


how will you hear me when I open my mouth?

by strikinglight



Category: Persona 4, Persona Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Graduation, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Game(s), Shoujo Manga Tropes Galore, Slow Burn, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-08
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-19 18:15:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 27,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4756274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s never had anything (or, well, anyone) that’s made saying goodbye so hard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. humming in the ribs

**Author's Note:**

> The nth installment of what seem to be an endless stream of Souyo-slow-burn experiments, because how long can you hide your feelings until they come back to bite you in the--
> 
> I'm indebted to these [two](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172100) [poems](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-city-in-which-i-loved-you/) by Li-Young Lee for the titles and for the feelings, and to [Susie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sashimisusie/pseuds/orbit) for frantically sketching out the blueprints for this fic with me on Twitter.

Souji’s first major realization of the year is that it’s surprisingly difficult to be alone in Inaba.

You’d think that a small country town located out in the most far-flung of nowheres would be a lonely place. He knows he thought so, before being delivered here in a flurry of leaves in the wind and the steely whistle of the morning train—but ten months has been more than enough to teach him otherwise. There’s something about Inaba’s smallness that draws everyone who lives in it so close to itself, the threads of one life tangling in the ends of so many others it’s virtually impossible to glance over your shoulder without spotting a familiar face.

Take today, for example. He was ready, early this morning, to make the first shrine visit of the new year by himself, his uncle and cousin having begged off in light of their recent discharge from the hospital—never mind that he had had to cajole and reason and joke and plead for almost half an hour before Nanako would agree to stay in bed. It wouldn’t have been his first time to stand before a shrine, hands together and head bowed, placed in the smack middle of the crush of cheery groups of friends and closely knit little families and yet, somehow, still quite alone.

 “Hey, partner!”

The shrines in his memories are bigger, towering and ornate homunculi of red paint and gold leaf, and the crowds milling about more boisterous. On this first day of the year, sleepy little Inaba only has its own humbler (and, to his mind, much friendlier) counterpart to offer him, residents of the town trickling quietly in and out of the unpainted wooden gates. And the surprise of not one friendly face but four, as Souji spies the distinctive shapes and colors of one familiar family on the curb—Mr. and Mrs. Hanamura smiling gently out at him, Teddie sketching huge rainbow shapes in the air with his arms as he waves, and Yosuke, half-buried in a voluminous, bright red jacket, one arm likewise lifted in salutation.

“My mom said to ask you to visit with us,” he says as he strides across the street to meet Souji halfway. There’s a slight flush, flowering across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, likely from the chilly air, and small, pale clouds of breath come out of his mouth in time to the words. “Nobody should be alone on New Year’s Day, after all. What d’you say?”

What can he possibly say to that? The sight of Yosuke’s broad grin is enough to push his own mouth up into a small answering smile and all he manages is a polite litany of “thank you’s”—for the offer, for the subsequent good wishes from Yosuke’s parents, the murmured words of praise about how tall he is, how handsome, how smart to be able to ace all his tests, how wonderful for taking such good care of Dojima-san and poor Nanako-chan. He’s never been cooed at and fussed over in this way by anyone before, or been taken by the elbow and guided forward to say his prayers, or had coins pressed into his hand for the offering—like it’s the simplest thing for the universe to pick him up and slip him ever-so carefully in with someone else’s family.

Maybe this is something other people get used to, the idea of being part of some kind of “us,” but even after ten months in Inaba the thought remains as startling to Souji as the thought of growing a second head, or of losing an arm. He feels it as a warmth, settling feathery above his heart in spite of the midwinter cold that nips at his ears and the back of his neck. Then there's the glow of Yosuke's smile again as they stand shoulder-to-shoulder before the offertory box, smaller now, a little sheepish: _Sorry, Teddie and I talk about you all the time._

In perfect time with the rest of the Hanamura household, Souji claps his hands before the shrine, bows his head, and prays. He’s not sure what he should wish for, and there are too many images from the last ten months cycling behind his closed eyes—too many faces that now light up in recognition at the sight of him in shops and on street corners, too many “us”-es—that all he can think to say to whatever force might be listening is thank you.

_Thank you for bringing me here._

“Hey, hey.” Yosuke again, in a whisper that pulls him right out of his prayer, a sharp elbow prodding him in the side, real and solid but nowhere near hard enough to hurt. “What’d you wish for?”

 

* * *

 

 “They won’t shut up about you,” Yosuke says into his phone that night. “They just kept going on and on at dinner about how wonderful you are. I mean, get this, my mom wants to find you a girlfriend—she wouldn’t even believe me when I told her you didn’t already have one.”

“Say thank you for me.” There’s not a shred of irony in the voice on the other end of the line, in the gentle murmuring laugh, nearly soundless. “I think they’re wonderful too.”

Are they, really? Yosuke pauses. Running just underneath his conversation with Souji are all the sounds of his house, an everyday sort of commotion so familiar now it’s easy not to hear it—his parents singing along to some old record in the dining room, Teddie warbling right alongside them and substituting any forgotten lyrics with “lalala’s” and “shoobeedoobeedoo’s,” the creak of cabinets opening and closing, ceramic plates clattering against each other as they’re put away.

He can imagine it’s not so lively at the Dojimas’, for all that it’s likely just as warm (they’re a small, Teddie-free household, for one). To say nothing of—there’s a sudden, inexplicable knot in his chest as he realizes this—a house he doesn’t know, three cities away, empty and shut down behind drawn curtains and locked doors until Souji finally comes back to it. A house—or is it an apartment?—with white boxes of empty space in his imagination where the rooms are supposed to be, and a Souji he’s not quite so familiar with closing the front door behind him, bag slung over his shoulder, alone.

To be frank, Yosuke finds himself a little shocked at how little he likes this idea—how intense the bitter taste it leaves in his mouth is.

“For the record,” he says, “you can come over for dinner whenever you want. Bring Nanako when she’s better. We can make it a party.”

He can see it already, his father at the stove, his mother breaking out the good china, Teddie pulling a chair at the dining table out for Nanako with a princely flourish. And Souji framed and smiling in the doorway, stepping out of his shoes and into the Hanamura household with all the poise in the world, like he’s always belonged there, like it’s only right. Probably with a gift in hand, of course, as a courtesy; Souji’d remember something like that. Pastries, maybe, or bread. Or flowers for the house—but if so, cue another monologue from Mom about what a nice boyfriend he’d make some lucky girl, some daughter of a friend of hers, some niece. But even that wouldn’t be so bad, Yosuke thinks, for a little more light in the house.

“I’ll tell her.” There’s no background noise for Yosuke to pick up, just Souji’s voice and the rise and fall of his breath into the receiver—but maybe if his smile had a sound that would be it, that whisper of indrawn air, so soft you’d miss it if you weren’t listening close. “We’ll take you up on it soon, definitely.”

“Yeah, you’d better.” Yosuke swivels toward his desk and his eyes fall on his new calendar. It's a New Year present from Teddie, grabbed on a five-second run through the office supplies section at Junes. The paper is an embarrassing shade of pastel-yellow, decorated with smatterings of pink and blue stars, but at least the boxes that mark the days are each a few inches across—big enough to write notes in, perfect for drawing up plans, deciding what to do with time. "Just let me know when."

And because he's already started thinking about time, the questions begin to wind up in front of him one by one, little threads of smoke and uncertainty: How soon is soon? How much time do they have left? And again the image of the house-or-apartment buried somewhere in the shadowy, jagged outline of a big city, so far off it may as well be some other life, some other Souji who’ll be heading home to it on the bullet train in… how long?

“Souji?”

“What’s up, partner?”

He’s never been good at math, and the calculations come so easily and so quickly to him that he almost doesn’t want to believe how all the numbers add up. From January 1 to March 20, 79 days, 103 hours, 6,180 minutes of human time. Big numbers, but Yosuke can’t help wondering if they’ll be enough, given how quickly they burned through last year, racing through each week and each new mystery until all they had left was just that little handful of seconds counting down to midnight.

“Let’s take a trip or something soon,” he says. “With everyone. One last big hurrah before…”

Yosuke lets the sentence trail. Souji sits, steady on the other end of the phone in his hand, still so sure, still so near, and waits.


	2. the art of memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The grass suddenly seems greener, the sky bluer, now that rest is the only activity left. Rest, and time, and whatever else it is makes the memories that he’ll fold up and file away in a small quiet place somewhere inside him, for later.

Souji realizes he’s not in the habit of asking people for things, especially for something as dear as time. This is one of only a small handful of instances he can remember being the one to punch in Yosuke’s cellphone number and stand listening to the low electric rings, five different versions of his request cycling slowly through his head, each more unobtrusive than the last. He’s still not sure exactly which one he’s going to go with when the ringing finally stops, becomes the sound of one of the voices he knows best in the world.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Hi,” he manages, after only the briefest flicker of a pause. It’s a start, and now that he finally has a real person on the other end of the line it’s easier to go from that to, “Can I have a little of your time today? I was thinking of going up to the hill.”

“Sure, man,” Yosuke answers, without missing a beat. Souji can practically hear his grin, see it spreading wide and bright as the fogless sky outside his window, and feels himself light up a little in return. “I’ll come get you there.”

It’s thirty or so seconds and just a handful of words; Souji blinks in surprise to find that suddenly his day’s been made. There’s his Sunday afternoon, unfolding gently in front of him when minutes later he slides open the front door to reveal, like magic, his best friend.

“Better bring your coat,” Yosuke says, red-nosed and laughing, hair windblown. “It’s still a little nippy, you know?”

What's it like, Souji wonders, to be so free with your days and your smiles?

It’s a longer walk than usual to the hill that overlooks the town; both of them find they’re dragging their feet, making S-shapes. They dawdle, Yosuke chattering at length about how the snow has thinned on this or that overhanging tree branch, Souji laughing aloud at the fat winter birds coming out for the sun. There’s no need to run anymore. Everything moves so much more slowly now, all the pieces of their little world and this bone-white day suspended somewhere between winter and spring.

They barely even notice as the road rises and begins to slope upward under their feet, not until they round the crest of the hill at last. Yosuke swings himself up to sit on the wooden fence at its edge, his legs splayed and dangling, Souji following more carefully, and that only after reaching out and testing the rails with his hand to see if they can bear the combined weight of two gangly teenage boys.

Then suddenly all of Inaba is spread out below them, roofs clustering together like mushrooms, so small it barely even stretches from one end of the horizon to the other. But also somehow immense, Souji thinks, too immense for his eyes to take in because it stretches on forever, and ever, and ever. And there’s the long rope of the Samegawa running its meandering course through his line of sight—steely grey in the deep winter, muddy brown in rainy season, but today bright and crystalline and very nearly blue.

“Do you remember where my house is?” Yosuke asks, grinning, and he looks like he’s just a beat away from clapping his hands like a child when Souji inclines his head inquiringly and points. “Awesome! And there, there’s your house.”

 _My house,_ Souji thinks. Something in his chest drops like a stone, and the hand that’s further from Yosuke clenches ever so slightly, going white-knuckled on the wooden rail underneath him. _That’s my house._

He’s always thought of himself as something of an expert at goodbyes; he isn’t prepared for the realization that somehow it’s different this time. If you simply pass in and out of things long and often enough, it becomes like night turning to day, natural as the light changing—but over the course of the past months it feels like he’s stalled, like something doesn’t quite add up, and somehow bits and pieces of Inaba have found their way inside of him without his permission, lingering, becoming special. How does that even happen?

 _Just being born, living your life,_ Yosuke seems to tell him—a different Yosuke, albeit one from not too long ago, from a different afternoon on this hill. He wonders if this Yosuke, the one beside him in the here and now, has fixed the picture of that day in his memory as clearly as Souji has. _Before you know it, you’re already special to someone._

_Like you. You’re special to me, you know?_

Is he still special now that their great adventure’s almost over? The grass suddenly seems greener, the sky bluer, now that rest is the only activity left. Rest, and time, and whatever else it is makes the memories that he’ll fold up and file away in a small quiet place somewhere inside him, for later. He counts every building, every battle, every odd job he’s ever worked, every unlikely friend, every song Yosuke’s ever strongarmed him enthusiastically into listening to, clapping those huge, unwieldy headphones over his ears.

In the days ahead, Souji knows, when he finds himself looking down at a quite different landscape from a quite different height, he’ll take them out, dust them off, look at them for as long as he needs to.

 

* * *

 

For a change, Yosuke’s the one who asks Souji up to the roof for lunch on the last day of class. They still have exams lined up for that afternoon, and his head is heavy with the names of old French generals and the parts of the plant cell. The faint shadows under Souji’s eyes don’t suggest he’s had much sleep either ( _Was he up all night cramming too?_   Yosuke wonders, but almost immediately, _Nah, not Souji_ ), so it doesn’t take much more than a look and a cocked head and a slight nod in answer. They rise from their seats, lunchboxes in hand, and duck out onto the stairwell for the chance to be quiet together.

One last day. One last test. One last push. In his mind’s eye Yosuke sees the date scrawled on the blackboard at the front of their classroom, the chalk lines white-hot as burning brands—and there’s something about that, and something about the word _last_ that nearly kills his appetite completely. But he’s never been one to waste a good lunch, so he swallows the lump in his throat and without speaking passes Souji one of those infuriatingly cutesy octopus sausages his mother makes, and picks a pork cutlet up with his chopsticks in return.

 “You overcooked the tonkatsu a bit,” Yosuke finally says after a few seconds of careful chewing, like a few extra seconds in the pan and too much panko should be enough to explain away the sudden dryness in his mouth, stop the spidery little cracks in his voice from betraying him completely.

“What are you talking about? My tonkatsu’s perfect.”

It is; they both know that it is. Souji’s cooking is always perfect, and it’s so like him to shove that fact right into Yosuke’s face, shooting down every single one of his excuses with that painstakingly cultivated air of nonchalance. “Want a soda?”

“Yeah, please.” Yosuke tries to smile at him, but the muscles in his face feel stiff and slow and can’t quite get it right, and what comes out is likely a grimace, the quick flash of bared teeth. He doesn’t take his eyes off Souji when the other boy nods and unfolds his long legs to stand and cross the roof deck to the pair of vending machines by the door.

“Heads up.”

What lands in his open palms is a can of The Natural—Yosuke’s favorite, though he knows Souji prefers TaP. The can is cold from the machine, wet with condensation in his hands as he cracks it open and drinks. The bubbly rush of the liquid down his throat feels like a drizzle in a drought.

“Do you mind if I—” Souji starts to say, but Yosuke passes the can across before he can finish, holding it out end-first like the fingers that uncurl and lift to receive it are shards of glass. He tries to convince himself he isn’t staring when Souji puts his lips to the rim.

Yosuke doesn’t know where this desire comes from, this sudden need to touch him that’s so strong it throws him off balance. The force of it almost makes him lurch clumsily forward into Souji’s chest, sending the can clattering out of his grasp and what remains of its contents spilling out across the floor.

It’s not like he wants to hug him and sob into the front of his shirt or anything. Just to reach out and catch Souji’s shoulder or arm with his hand, stop him from going off someplace Yosuke can’t follow him (or anyone else, he mentally amends, any of the friends they’ve made over the course of this one too-short year of their lives). Grab him by the sleeve, maybe, taking extra care not to make contact with his skin. Would such a small gesture be enough, maybe, to make him stay?

(Souji’s watching him out of the corner of his eye like he’s waiting for him to say something. Yosuke shifts his gaze down to their feet too quickly, wondering all the while what it is about those eyes that makes him feel so small.)

There’s still nothing here—they can see that from the rooftop as easily as from the hill, or any high place for miles around—and in a way there’s even _more_ nothing now. No more fighting, no more case, no more surreptitious runs through the electronics section of Junes that end with vaulting headfirst into strange worlds where they can be heroes. But isn’t that enough to stay for? Souji doesn’t have to be a hero anymore; he doesn’t have to be anybody’s last hope. All he needs to be is Souji, and if he stays here they can be the ones to take care of him for once, close ranks in a tight circle around him like they’ve always done.

“We—” he starts to say, and his voice cracks on the word for real because how much longer do they have, anyway, to be an “us?” “We should probably head back down soon.”

It shouldn’t be this hard. Souji’s already seen him cry. Souji’s already looked, technically, into the darkest part of his soul—looked, and seen, and still chosen to stay.


	3. this room and everything in it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yosuke knows in his bones that something is ending, and neither of them can see beyond endings just at the moment

When they emerge from within the electronics section of Junes for what each of them knows is the final time, the first thing they notice is that it’s stopped raining. What they get instead on the road home from their great unsung victory is a sunset, late afternoon melting into twilight right outside the main door in watercolor splashes of gold and orange and purple. The rays slant through tree branches and telephone wires still glistening with rain, and for a while all they can do is stand at the crest of the road leading back toward the center of town, shading their eyes with their hands against the sudden glare, speechless with the knowledge that this is finally,  _finally_ how it ends.

(They remember, from just a few heartbeats ago, the burning of a different sun, coming up for the first time in that strange world. Behind their eyes they can still see it, straight shafts of golden light slicing through the already-dissipating fog. Maybe they’ll always see it, that light, carry it with them in their heads and in their hands and in their chests, for the rest of their days.)

What a funny figure they must cut, Souji thinks, this mismatched set of high school kids with strangely rumpled uniforms. Their eyes are wide and shot through with a fever-gleam like they’re ready to take on the world, and they stand close, drawn together by their own gravity, leaning on each other. Rise between Naoto and Kanji, her arms threaded through theirs, as though she needs the reassurance of their weight to keep herself upright, and Teddie leaning nearly boneless against Kanji’s far shoulder. Chie and Yukiko hand in hand, fingers entangled and gripping fit to bruise.

Souji himself doesn’t realize how low his shoulders have sagged under the iron weight of his own fatigue, or that he’s been slightly favoring his left leg since they climbed out of the TV, until Yosuke draws up by his side and tells him, “Here, lean on me.”

“We should get home,” he says to the circle, and it’s a surprise to find his own voice still firm, but so quiet. It’s a pale echo of what his friends call his “leader-voice,” the steely, commanding tone he’s used directing battles and exploring dungeons for what has felt like years—he can probably retire that way of speaking now, he thinks, along with his sword. “My uncle has a big dinner waiting.”

Even these much softer words still have the power to make them move—or maybe it’s just the mention of food, making its way through seven pairs of ears and descending straight into the pits of seven bellies, producing a low grumbling noise that reverberates all around the circle like a small earthquake. Hands go to stomachs then, suspicious glances dart back and forth and around—“Was that  _your_ stomach? Yours? I  _know_ it was yours, Ted!”—and Souji feels the laughter building in his own core and bubbling up out of him before he can rein it in. 

He’s never laughed like this before, the sound all golden, shaking up his entire body until he drops his head back against Yosuke’s shoulder, eyes screwed shut and dangerously close to running over with tears. Of course Yukiko’s the first to follow suit—the force with which she doubles over nearly sends both her and Chie crashing to the ground—but then Chie’s tugging on her hand and giggling too and Teddie is near-howling into Kanji’s jacket and even Naoto is bringing her sleeve to her mouth as though to try and push the sound back inside.

There’s a knot between Souji’s ribs at the sound of so many bright voices, and a lancing sharpness in his chest where the breath’s been caught and trapped. It’s such a welcome pain he doesn’t even think he’d mind if he fell over and died from it right now, his friends a fortress around him, Yosuke’s shoulders steady and sure under his arm even as their bodies lean and lurch and shudder. They’re still laughing as they begin to move, all of them together, unsteadily pushing and pulling each other toward home.

He wonders if now that the fog has cleared in the TV world something has changed here too, become somehow more solid—solid as the resounding echo of eight voices winding all the way up into the steadily darkening sky, or as Yosuke’s arm looped around his waist, bracing his weight and not letting go.

“D’you guys get sushi?” Yosuke asks, as they round the corner into the shopping district. A few steps ahead, Rise and Teddie are chattering about nipping by this or that store for their own dinner-contributions—some ganmodoki Rise’s grandmother will likely give them on the house, and a bag full of Topsicles. “I told Nanako-chan the Premium set’s good for special occasions—you know, the one with the star on the box.”

“I think you had her at the star, to be honest,” Souji answers, and feels the ache in his chest rise and spread up along his jawline as he smiles.

 

* * *

 

Yosuke’s pretty sure no one from that big school back in Tokyo—a place that’s faded now in his memory to the squat outline of a building and the echo of a different bell—would do for him what they’re doing now for Souji. This large-scale sendoff involves too many feelings and too many little, niggling inconveniences, and Yosuke’s knees are beginning to buckle under the hassle of rounding up everyone by phone, of struggling out of bed early on what’s supposed to be a free day, of saying goodbye to his best friend.

He knows that no one he’s ever known has looked at him, in Tokyo or anywhere, the way he and his friends must be looking at Souji right now, like he doesn’t even need to be gone yet to make them hungry for the sight of him. The brim of Naoto’s hat is drawn down a little lower than usual over her forehead, Yosuke notes, and there’s a telltale twitch in Kanji’s jaw where his teeth have likely clenched themselves to aching. Next to him, Yukiko’s already pulling out her handkerchief.

They’ve solved every mystery for miles around, squared off with a goddess to close the book on their case and then some, but there’s nothing complacent about the look in Souji’s own eyes as he looks fondly around at them all and lets his gaze come to rest at last on Yosuke’s face. One year of their lives gone and Yosuke finds he now knows that look as well as he knows the sight of his own reflection in the mirror—sharp, searching, as though Souji wants to reach out his hands and unravel the wordless tangle of knots they’ve tied themselves up into. As though even this late in the story he’s found some new truth to chase, something he thinks might even be worth coming undone for.

“Take care,” Souji tells him, and it should be the lamest, most generic goodbye in the whole world, but it isn’t—they’re staring right into each other’s eyes as he says it and somehow that makes the statement fall heavily, pushed forward out of his mouth and into the air between them by some force neither of them can identify.

“Yeah,” Yosuke manages, and stomps an imaginary foot down hard on the temptation to bite his lip and look away. Who knows how long it’s going to be before they stand face-to-face like this again? Who knows who they’ll be, even, when  _next time_  finally comes around? “You too, partner.”

There’s still so much more he wants to tell him, and those four tiny words don’t even scratch the surface. There are needles behind his eyes and his throat is closing around something somewhere between  _go kill it back home_  and _don’t go_ , between  _you’re the best friend I’ve ever had_  and _I, uh, I—_

And  _come back soon._  Always, always,  _come back soon,_  or maybe, because Yosuke knows in his bones that something is ending and neither of them can see beyond endings just at the moment _—when can I see you again?_

It’s bizarre how Souji seems to hear all the things he doesn’t say, from the way he lingers on the platform, vacillating. It’s just a few near-indiscernible seconds of slowdown but Yosuke notices the pause and recognizes it for what it is, like he’s waiting—to say something more? or for Yosuke to speak up, perhaps?—still wearing that same probing look. He hopes to all the gods and spirits watching over them that Souji won’t try to touch him, reach out for a handshake or a fist-bump or a half-hug; he knows that if they’re given even the smallest chance to hold on to each other now, it’s a real possibility that he won’t be able to keep himself steady. That he’ll buckle, and cling, and pull their combined weight to the ground and not let go.

Soon enough Souji catches himself waiting too, squares his shoulders and shifts the weight of his bag upwards as if to say,  _Okay, then,_  and steps with all the purpose in the world through the sliding door. He turns outward so he can face them, and his smile is an unwavering, fierce, bright thing, even from behind the glass.

When the train begins to pull out of the station, his friends chase it, arms waving, voices raised in love and blessing and assurances that they won’t forget. Yosuke runs along with them, of course, his steps quickly outstripping Chie’s rapid staccato-steps and Kanji’s long and loping strides and carrying him all the way to the end of the platform. Then, too suddenly, the toes of his shoes meet empty air and he has to bring himself to a sharp stop, finding himself nose-to-nose with the truth that Souji’s outrun them all. This is as far as they’ll go, all of them together. This far, and no further. It should be enough.

 _There you are,_  Yosuke thinks, and as he watches the train round the corner he can’t decide if it’s too fast or too slow—a single heartbeat, or years.  _Going off on your own again._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> panicked screaming because this train is carrying us past endgame and into uncharted waters


	4. the sun on the face of the wall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m all right, but what about you? I want to know how you are.”
> 
> It’s terrifyingly easy to forget where he is when Yosuke starts to answer—when he starts to talk, and Souji closes his own mouth and listens, head sunk into the pillow, receiver pressed close to his ear so he can hang on tightly to each word.

One of the strangest things about being in Tokyo is that half the time Souji still finds he doesn’t know if he’s arriving or returning. The city seems to necessitate a shift even in the way he breathes, the inhalations coming faster, shallower, the pulse speeding up beneath his skin in response to the black jaggedness of the skyline, the neon lights, the traffic. It’s a good thing that most days his body reacquaints itself with the world in front of him miles ahead of his brain, muscle memory carrying him into old-new building and up to old-new apartment, down to old-new train stations and around old-new street corners to old-new school. Otherwise he’s sure he’d just find himself wandering up and down the halls of the labyrinth that is Tokyo Station, peering vacantly into the windows of all the little shops and wondering how everything suddenly started moving so fast.

His old-new uniform is a little tight around the neck where the collar of the shirt buttons up to make way for the tie, but the people at school seem to recognize him in it, even if at the same time it’s like they aren’t completely sure that they do. His classmates are congenial and polite but their eyes watch him closely—turned heads and curious glances scanning for any perceptible changes a year out in the countryside might have wrought in his face, the set of his shoulders, his walk, his city-boy accent. They greet him with “Welcome back, Seta-kun!” and “How are you, Seta-kun?” and remark that there _is_ something different about him, but in a good way—he still doesn’t talk or laugh much, but he smiles more, maybe. Maybe he got a little taller, or maybe it's just that he stands a little straighter. They’re not sure, and neither is he, though once in a while he’ll walk by a window and glance at his reflection to try and recognize himself.

He does his best to relearn their names—at least the names of the ones who talk to him, the ones who pass for friends. Futaba, Otori, Shirakawa, Kondo. One is on the basketball team, another’s good at math, another sings soprano in the glee club, another paints. And as the days pass, he finds they learn Souji Seta in much the same way; they see him stop and pet the orange tabby that haunts their school gate after hours, they call him out for karaoke on Sundays and note that he’ll come but not sing, and their lunchtime conversations bubble over with praise for his meticulously put-together home-cooked meals and the fact that he always brings enough to share.

This is a rhythm that’s easy enough to fall into—he’s done this kind of mental cataloguing in the past, though _those_ long lists of names and faces and special interests seem half a world away now. The only thing he seems unable to manage is answering the question of what it was like in Inaba, of how it felt to live in a place a lot of the people in his grade would have a hard time even finding on a map—suddenly Souji finds the words draining away from him faster than water, and he only ever gets as far as “It was…” before the breath constricts in his chest and they disappear completely.

In these moments Souji freezes, caught suddenly in the uncertain space between two lives, and for the space of a few heartbeats he finds he’s not sure what self to put on. There are sword calluses on his hands he can explain away with kendo, a plethora of pictures on his cellphone of unusually happy-looking stray cats with silky fur and bright eyes, silly print-out photos in his wallet of his cousin and his uncle and his friends—any number of things he can use to tell them a story of some kind, but it feels wrong, almost, like the pieces of Inaba he carries in his memories will shrink, lose their color if he ever lets them out into the air.

“It was all right,” he always says. And again, in the emails he sends his mother every Sunday, “Everything’s all right.” And again, into the phone, so quietly it’s as though he’s speaking directly into Yosuke’s ear, “I’m all right, but what about you? I want to know how you are.”

It’s terrifyingly easy to forget where he is when Yosuke starts to answer—when he starts to talk, and Souji closes his own mouth and listens, head sunk into the pillow, receiver pressed close to his ear so he can hang on tightly to each word. Some nights he finds himself falling asleep to that voice, to the reassuring, shapeless chatter pouring into his ear about everything they both already know—the light on the river, bicycles, mid-season sales, vacant chairs at the usual table in the Junes food court.

Falling asleep on Yosuke means waking up to a string of pseudo-angry text messages the next day—he learns, among other things, that he has a tendency to snore—but it’s worth it for the hours of rare, golden, uninterrupted sleep it gets him, and for the warmth stealing its way into the old-new room that’s all that passes for home.

 

* * *

 

Ai Ebihara sits in front of Yosuke this year. It’s a relief, in a way, because there’s no one less like Souji in all of Inaba, probably; Ai doesn’t ever smile at him, or whisper the answers to difficult questions to him over her shoulder when this or that teacher of theirs catches him zoning out in the middle of class, eyes trained on the blackboard but rapidly slipping out of focus and gazing off into the distance. They’ve never even spoken. He doubts she remembers his name.

(Oh, but the way Souji always smiled at him last year, sidelong, the lift of the corner of his mouth so small and subtle and perfect, whenever Yosuke came out of his stupor long enough to catch the answers and say them out loud like he’d thought of them himself. He’s sure it would be near-impossible to find someone who could echo back even the barest flicker of that smile. But Yosuke pinches himself hard enough to bruise whenever he thinks about these things because no—no more Souji, and by extension no more answers to any questions Yosuke might have, in or outside of the classroom. Is it any wonder he studies twice as hard now, or that some evenings he peels off his school jacket and finds his arm covered in little red welts?)

 “Just give him a call,” Chie hisses at him through her teeth from the desk next to his, in the ten-minute lull between English and history. “It’s not like he died or anything.”

No, it isn’t. But of late his conversations with Souji have been few and far between, the silences longer between “how was your day” and “what about you,” the words that spell the answers strangely brittle, more delicate somehow. He knows it’s selfish and unfair, but he can’t help how little he likes hearing stories he isn’t part of, peopled with characters he doesn’t know. They look like faceless little stick figures in his head—there’s a girl that sits behind Souji now in his old-new classroom, someone shy and good at math, and a boy on the basketball team next to him who’s always late and forever borrowing his notes. He knows it’s just a little spiteful, but he’s pretty sure that neither of them call Souji by his first name. He wonders if anyone over there does.

For his own part there’s been nothing to tell Souji that seems even remotely interesting—that they’ve moved up into class 3-1 and Ai Ebihara sits in front of him, that he and Chie have been spending their evenings at cram school, that he’s working weekend shifts at Junes. He doesn’t know what to do with the polite, measured voice on the other end asking if the routine is tiring him out, asking what they’re studying right now, asking _Could you tell Ai I said hello?_

Yosuke finds he never knows how to end these conversations, either. Too often he’s caught himself stumbling over a “see you tomorrow” uttered by reflex, backpedaling hastily and warping it into a halfhearted “see you soon, I hope.” More cumbersome still is the rare “I… We miss you,” to which Souji always replies, without a flicker of hesitation, “I miss you all too.” Like he hasn’t heard Yosuke’s voice catch, whereas Yosuke screams his regret at himself inside his head each time he says it. Soon he stops saying it at all.

“Yosuke!” Chie again. “Tell me you’ll call him!”

Her eyes are boring holes in the side of his head, he knows, like she’s trying to stare straight through him—and he knows that she can, that she’s probably already connected the dots while he’s still here, sitting frozen on his hands. Chie would pick up on it if anyone did, faster than catching a whiff of a steak on the grill all the way down in the shopping district.

“Maybe.” Yosuke’s found that dealing with these peculiar feelings—the persistent buzzing between his ears, the dull, acidic ache in his chest that won’t go away no matter how many glasses of water he drinks—is a lot like needing to pee on a long road trip. It’s a lot more bearable if you don’t say it aloud, especially not when you’re speeding out on the freeway without a single rest stop in sight for miles. “But not today; gotta study.”

For the record, it’s not a lie.

He doesn’t miss the look that Chie trades with Yukiko, two tables down, some unspoken message drawn taut like a wire between them. It’s something they’ve always been strangely good at, that funny best-friend thing where you seek each other’s eyes out and it just completely eliminates all need to speak. The room may as well be falling away, everything fading to invisibility but the two of them and all the things they understand together.

Do they even know how to be without each other? What wrecks they’ll both be, he imagines, by the time next spring comes around.

 _I don’t think we ever looked at each other that way,_ he thinks. _Must be a girl thing._


	5. notes of a moment ago

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While there’s a part of him that longs for a time and place in which talking to Yosuke was as easy as glancing over one shoulder, there’s another part—the part that wins out during most of the arguments that Souji has with himself on this matter—that balks, pulling its finger rapidly away from the Call button.

He finds his friends again in fragments, whenever, wherever he can.

Chie and Yukiko and even Kanji are good at keeping his email inbox inundated with updates about the various goings-on in their neck of the woods—complete, especially in Chie’s case, with photo documentation, and Souji looks forward to few things more than booting up his computer in the evenings and scrolling through an entire folder’s worth of snapshots. Teddie in the bear suit, working the grill at Junes. Nanako beaming from ear to ear from behind a pile of Children’s Day presents. His uncle at the kitchen counter, a tray of teacups in his hands, mouth open and brow creased in a frown like he’s in the middle of telling the person behind the camera to knock it off. Basketball games, soccer games, the drama club’s spring production. Everything he isn’t there for, everything at once familiar and not.

“Are you coming over for summer break?” Some nights Yukiko calls him from the inn, and Souji swears to himself that the delicate lilt of her voice through the phone line is one of the loveliest sounds in the world. “Rise-chan and Naoto-kun too?” 

“That’s the plan,” he says. It’s weird to hear his own voice issuing smooth and unbroken into the receiver, sounding infinitely more confident than he feels. He wonders if she’ll call him out on it, thinks she probably won’t, as a kindness. “I think they’re finding their own way there, but you know me. I’ll be on the train as soon as my last class lets out.”

“I don’t think you’ll be able to get here fast enough, honestly. We really, _really_ miss you. You can pretty much expect to be dogpiled the minute you step out of the station.”

“I miss all of you too, so much.” Even as he speaks his ears strain for the sounds of the inn behind Yukiko’s voice—the quiet clatter of porcelain as she stacks plates, a faucet. Will this set the people at the inn gossiping again? What business does she have going about her daily errands with her phone stuck between her ear and shoulder, anyway? “I’m almost looking forward to the dogpile. And, hang on, are you doing the dishes?”

“We’re a little short-staffed in the kitchen, so I’m on washing duty, but I also told Chie I’d secure your promise to visit ASAP. You tell me which of those chores is more important, Souji Seta.” He knows she’s smiling, but there’s something sad about it too that he can hear, something she’s taking care to leave unsaid, beneath the sound of the water. “I mean, who knows how many chances we’re all going to get to be together again, after this year?”

“I’ll come,” he promises. It’s a promise made to himself as much as it is to her, and to the rest of them, waiting for him back in the only place in the world he thinks of when he thinks of home. “As soon as I can.”

He hasn’t seen Rise and Naoto at all since their pointedly inconspicuous return to Tokyo in May. He imagines them, sunglassed and travel-weary, leaning sleepily on each other’s shoulders in the back seat of a heavily tinted private car, and wonders if the sudden change of scenery has been as hard on them as it was on him. But his juniors _are_ professionals, he thinks fondly—more grown-up than he is, in a way, falling into the old-new rhythms of the careers they put on hold, taking much more intense sets of old-new expectations in stride.

He knows better than to take their invitations to visit them at work anytime, _anytime_ at all, at face value, but all the same he writes down the addresses of Rise’s studio and the police station in Sumida to which Naoto’s been assigned. He slips the note between the pages of his planner like a promise of more chances, like hope for more time. _Let’s get dinner and catch up soon, when stuff isn’t so hectic_ —invitations and more promises and more than a little wishful thinking, conveyed via streams of text messages and the occasional brief phone call, but he’s thankful for all of it anyway, because it’s a relief to even be breathing the same air.

In the midst of all of this, it’s distressing to realize that each week Souji spends in the city, turning the pages on his calendar, looking out his bedroom window to observe the days stretching out from late spring into early summer, the shape of Yosuke in his imagination fades more and more to the outline of a large question mark. He can maybe chalk it up to the various difficulties of part-time work, to the sudden unexpected surge of studiousness that Kanji and the girls tell him infected Yosuke sometime around the beginning of the academic year. On that score Souji knows he should be proud, and he’s not certain if he’s just being selfish when his gut lurches a little at the sight of Yosuke’s name on his cellphone screen, like something isn’t quite right.

 _Sorry, but can we talk later?_ Souji knows Yosuke to be transparent, but lately it’s been a little difficult to gauge the tone behind his messages, what his face would have looked like if they were right next to each other and he was speaking them aloud. _Meeting Chie in a bit, then cram school._

He wants to imagine Yosuke’s lopsided smile, Yosuke’s hand behind his head, scratching ruefully at his hair. _(Sorry, but can we talk later?)_ He doesn’t want to imagine Yosuke’s face falling, closing up like someone’s turned the lights down somewhere inside him. _(Sorry.)_ Or Yosuke’s eyes staring off into the distance, preoccupied. _(Can we talk later?)_

But, he realizes a little bitterly, who knows what faces Yosuke makes these days? For all Souji knows, he’s already missed out on a hundred, two hundred additions to his best friend’s repertoire of animated facial expressions. Who knows what else he misses out on, with every day he spends away?

 _Of course,_ Souji types. _Study well._ _Just text me whenever._

 _We can talk anytime,_ he wants to say, but refrains. While there’s a part of him that longs for a time and place in which talking to Yosuke was as easy as glancing over one shoulder, there’s another part—the part that wins out during most of the arguments that Souji has with himself on this matter—that balks, pulling its finger rapidly away from the Call button.

 

* * *

 

 _That last day on the hill. Or at the train station. You should have kissed him then,_ a small voice somewhere inside Yosuke says, so faint he almost loses it under the metallic whisper of the barber’s scissors.  _You could have at least asked him if it was okay._

_What would I want to do something like that for?_   Yosuke remembers a pair of yellow eyes, pointed as the edge of a scalpel in a face that’s no less than a disturbing carbon-copy of his own, and wonders if that self is more him than the self he now faces in the mirror. The him with the unusually close-cropped hair, skin just a little paler, the crows’ feet forming around the corners of his eyes mere battle scars from the stress of senior year and entrance exams, nothing more. _So much for having nothing left to hide._

(That bit about the entrance exams isn’t a lie, at least, even if right now it feels like he mostly said he wanted to go to college because the naggy career counselor insisted he write _something_ down on the form. At the very least, it’s another way to spend his time. It’s a new thing to chase, however abstract and distant the idea of university feels. Never mind that, when he tries to consider the specifics, his future makes another huge blank space in his already addled brain—holes opening up in response to the questions of where to go, of what to study, of who he’ll be with when he gets there, if he’s ever lucky enough to get there at all.)

At least the hair is something he has control over, and really all he needs is a small change to get him feeling like himself again. Never mind that in dramas and in shoujo manga, changing your hair effectively means changing your life, that it’s actually the person you were, pooling in loose strands on the floor, waiting to be swept into a dustpan and discarded. He doesn’t think he needs anything quite so grand, and anyway, that’s the sort of thing girls do, isn’t it? After breakups, once they’ve finished crying and binge-eating ice cream by the gallon?

For the record, he knows all this from listening to Chie and Yukiko—and increasingly Teddie, who’s been working the Books section lately, and sneaks in all his free manga-reading between shifts—blabbering excitedly to one another in the food court after school about this or that plot development, this or that ship that isn’t sailing. It’s a relief, in a way, proof that now they’re free to indulge in more pleasant diversions than the Midnight Channel. For his own part, he’s free to spend these after-school get-togethers contemplating the empty chair next to him, and the two on either side of Kanji, and wondering how the hell their table could possibly feel empty with five people clustered around it. That’s still more than half of the original eight, so what is he doing moping around like their friends have died for?

Still, there’s no way around the fact that these afternoons are quieter than they used to be, Rise and Naoto having followed Souji back to Tokyo a month or so after his departure, effectively splitting the Investigation Team into what Chie likes to call the City Division and the Inaba Division. They don’t need any more holes in their collective heart, Yosuke thinks, but it also stands to reason that they would have had to leave, eventually. Or is the word _return?_ They had homes in Tokyo, and careers, and people waiting for them. Reasons to be there, basically, that none of them have who remain Inaba-bound. Reasons to bring themselves within a few train stops of Souji, reasons to breathe the same smoggy urban air. Yosuke thinks he’d be jealous, but then again, what are the chances they even get to see each other?

 _Probably busy,_ he thinks. _Those three, they were always busy with something._

 _I bet he still looks the same._  He can’t stop the thought before it comes up like a thread of smoke from that small, dark place within. The gaps in his mind that remain unfilled by school and work and friends are, of course, full of Souji, despite his countless promises to himself that he won’t think about him anymore. And, always, there’s that voice in his head, like his Shadow is alive again and draping its long, lanky, all-too-familiar body across his shoulders, whispering in his ear: _you should have done something, said something, reached out and touched him, you should have, you should have, you should have—_

 _But why?_ Yosuke asks, and shoves it away. Souji wouldn’t have stayed for them—for him there was never any way out but through, forging ahead, resolute and utterly fearless—and Yosuke knows it’s the most wishful, most desperate, most pathetic kind of thinking to imagine that Souji would have stayed for _him_. Maybe in a parallel universe. Maybe in a parallel universe in which they were both crazy (but also possibly happy?).

He should know better than to fight himself, after all he’s been through—after all they’ve been through—but he can’t help it. He’s tired, and his mind is everywhere these days, wandering slowly and aimlessly through his classroom, down the produce aisle at Junes, up a series of streets he’s never been to and into the lobby of a particular apartment building he’s never visited, too far away. That’s all it is, just his mind wandering, and if a shiver runs down his spine he tells himself it’s because he isn’t used to feeling the air on the nape of his neck.

Because he needs to feel like Yosuke again, after the barber divests him of his gown and brushes the stray strands of hair from his shoulders, he opens up his phone and snaps a photo of himself. Head tilted smugly to one side to show off the haircut, face screwed up in his signature grin—a reasonably Yosuke-like expression, and it’s likewise a Yosuke thing to do to send it straightaway to Chie captioned, _You can call me Senpai._ He’s proud of himself until his phone beeps five minutes later and Chie’s reply shines out of the screen, the words decorated with sparkles and music notes.

_Hey, lookin’ good, Hanamura-senpai! Have you shown Souji?_

He’s not sure if he wants to burst out laughing, or scream.


	6. you are not in the wind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He did promise— _Let’s talk later._ It’s something that, if he’s being honest with himself, he’s been promising Souji for months, and he hates himself for it more than Souji must hate him by now.

The night before a big trip—or a big move, as the case may be—Souji thinks almost entirely in lists.

For instance, necessities for a one-week sojourn in Inaba: clothes, two pairs of shoes, cellphone, charger, wallet, two or three books for the train ride coming and going. Presents for everyone in a big paper bag—gourmet coffee grounds for Dojima, an extra-large chocolate bar for Nanako, boxes upon boxes of sweets for his friends. Toiletries unnecessary, because he knows he’ll find bottles of the shampoo and soap he likes waiting in the bathroom at his uncle’s house, his toothbrush still in the cup by the sink where he left it.

On the subject of things he’s raring to come home to: Dojima’s coffee, the warm curve the mug makes in his hand,  _Souji Seta_  scrawled across the side in permanent marker like testimony to the fact that he belongs in this house. The bright satin ribbon of Nanako’s laugh as he walks through the door. The fireflies making their slow spiraling dance in the air above the Samegawa. The cherry trees in the Yasogami High courtyard, the bars on the gate, the shape of the buildings from the outside. The usual table at Junes, all eight seats filled for the first time in what feels like years.

Things he needs to find out about after a four-month absence: Chie’s new training regimen, the state of things in the now-fogless TV world, the gossip being passed from hand-to-hand among the staff at the Amagi Inn. Rise’s plans for her comeback, Naoto’s newest cases, Kanji’s latest lines of crocheted coin-purses or scarves or stuffed animals.

(And, well, anything that’s happening to Yosuke, really. It feels as if he hasn’t spoken to Yosuke in forever—like there’s so much to tell him, and so much to catch up on, but also nothing much to say.)

Things Souji has left to do before leaving: pick up the laundry, take out the trash, throw the leftovers out so they don’t go bad while he’s away. Send some email—one to his parents, one to Dojima, one to the Investigation Team, all detailing plans and ETAs.

Under normal circumstances Souji knows he’d write Yosuke for the last one, and depend on him to pass the message around. To be honest, he’s not sure what makes the current circumstances  _abnormal,_ exactly, but there’s no denying that there’s something besides the distance that stands between them right now, even if he doesn’t yet know what it is. He’s not entirely sure he’ll find out, either, when tomorrow closes that distance and they find themselves face-to-face again, at once just like old times, but also not at all.

Then again, he supposes it’s not Inaba without mysteries to solve, so Souji writes Chie instead:  _Be there by noon tomorrow. Where do I meet you all?_ Once she gets his message, he knows Yukiko will probably hear of it in the next five minutes. By the end of the evening, they’ll have rounded up everyone else and drawn up a plan, the mysterious unknown variable that is Yosuke included (maybe, probably).

 _We’ll get you at the station,_ she answers, within the half-hour, and it’s gratifying to Souji to know that some things are still as easy as they ever were.  _All of us!_  

 

* * *

 

The calendar on Yosuke’s desk reads _July 27._ His cellphone begins to ring at exactly 9 PM, but it’s only at around 9:02, after much rummaging and shuffling and swearing under his breath, that he manages to find it and dig it out from between the pages of a trigonometry textbook. The words  _Rise Kujikawa_ are flashing across the screen, backlit in bright white, and it might just be his imagination but they do appear almost to sparkle as he presses Answer.

“Does my caller ID deceive me?” Yosuke drawls into the receiver with all the melodrama in the world. “Is this  _the_ Rise Kujikawa, returning pop idol superstar, calling my personal number?”

“Sorry, I didn’t realize I got the idiots’ hotline by mistake. I was looking for the Yosuke Hanamura with half a brain.” He can practically hear her rolling her eyes through the phone, but the pretense must get old for her fast, because she laughs soon after. “I was going to ask him how he was, too.”

“What an honor. Unfortunately, he was in the middle of trig homework.” He can imagine the look of disbelief on her face at this, those perfectly groomed eyebrows shooting straight up into her hairline. “You sound like you took that car ride like a trooper. Naoto with you?”

“Had to drop her off at her grandpa’s, so I just hit the shop now. My legs feel like jelly and I’m pretty sure I’ve lost all the circulation in my butt, but I couldn’t wait to say hi to all of you.” For all her complaints, Rise sounds charged, beaming. “Are we meeting Souji-senpai at the station tomorrow?”

Yosuke hates how he falters at the mention of Souji’s name, his grin cracking and going sour faster than at the sight of a page full of math problems. “Uh, yeah, I guess so. D’you know what time he’s getting in?”

“He texted me that he’d be on the noon train.” Rise’s voice softens at that, shifts from chirpy to puzzled. Vaguely disappointed, though Yosuke can’t possibly imagine what he’s done wrong. She sounds like she’s frowning—chewing at her lower lip, creasing her brow, albeit not too deeply, in the interest of avoiding wrinkles. “He didn’t let you know directly?”

“Nope. I haven’t heard from him in a while.” He wants it to sound like it’s nothing. He hasn’t seen Rise in three months, but part of him knows it’s still futile—he can’t fool her. It’s her specialty to perceive things, after all, and she has some of the keenest ears of anyone he’s ever met. “But, yeah, now that you mention it, I think Chie said something like that.”

“Yeah, there.” Sure enough, she’s unconvinced, but he’s grateful one way or another that she chooses to let it lie. “Tomorrow at noon, then. Don’t be late. Don’t forget, either.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, trying his hardest to summon back the cheer, if only to motivate himself to go back to trigonometry when Rise finally puts down the phone. “Now go take a hot bath or something, Miss Idol. Get that blood flowing back into your butt.”

 

* * *

 

When he steps out of the station it feels like surfacing from underwater. The colors of Inaba are brighter, the sunlight that falls on his face warmer, the air so sweet it’s as if he hasn’t breathed all the time he’s been away.

Just as Chie promised, there are his friends, two seconds after he steps past the pillars that frame the entrance. They’re the first things he sees and hears, in the real sense of seeing and hearing, clustering together in that familiar loose circle at the foot of the steps—Rise spots him first and calls out to him and without warning his ears are ringing with their voices, raised in various permutations of his name and the phrase “Welcome back!”

It’s almost shocking how hard it is to hold back. Souji wants to run, to drop his bags on the ground and throw himself into those flailing, waving arms, slot his body perfectly into the center of that circle where he belongs. It takes every little bit of control he can muster to shift the strap up higher onto his shoulder and keep walking until he draws up close enough to stand with them, every step heavier and more purposeful than the last.

“I’m home,” he says. As the Investigation Team, fully mustered for the first time in four long months, closes its circle around him, Souji makes another list.

Chie’s hair is just a little longer now, tendrils curling softly down around her face, and Kanji seems to have stopped both bleaching his and suffocating it with pomade. He’s never seen the sky-blue cardigan that gently hugs Yukiko’s shoulders before—a hand-knitted gift from the wonderful people at Tatsumi Textiles, she says with a giggle, to bring out the roses in her cheeks—or Teddie’s striped shirt, or the slender, pale arcs of Naoto’s bare arms where they hang relaxed by her sides. And of course as her comeback draws nearer and nearer it’s impossible not to notice the glow that seems to hang about Rise, a light under her skin that’s missing even from her most recent pre-hiatus TV commercials.

And Yosuke’s cut his hair. Souji finds himself lingering over this thought far longer than he should, eyes sliding of their own accord toward where his partner stands on the opposite side of the circle, head inclined down toward Naoto as she says something Souji can’t hear. There’s a sure set to Yosuke’s jawline now that’s entirely new, and the line of his bare nape is pleasingly straight, almost graceful.

(Souji can imagine, too well, how this might go in another life. “What happened to your hair?” some other Souji probably says, carefully toneless, as unceremoniously as if he’s reciting his grocery list. And, just as other-Yosuke’s eyes widen and he opens his mouth to babble some halfhearted defense of this particular aesthetic decision, something about the hot weather or the strings of the Junes apron, other-Souji smiles and adds, “It looks good.”)

 

* * *

 

The first half of the week passes in a flurry of activity; they hit the shopping district for an hours-long group catchup session on the first day, Okina for a movie on the second day, the beach on the third. In spite of the persistent aches in various body parts from so much walking and talking, and the hole this vacation is slowly but surely burning in his wallet, Yosuke’s glad they’re keeping so busy. Busy is safest. He can throw himself into these days and not worry.

Needless to say, it’s easy because the others are around. When they walk all together Souji’s always tended to hover near the middle of the group, because it’s easiest to see and hear and speak to everyone from the center, and it’s not so hard for Yosuke to slip unnoticed out of the slow rotation of people taking turns walking by his side. He hovers instead at the fringes, taking the lead or bringing up the rear, half-listening to the jokes so he knows when to laugh at them and chiming in when he hears his name.

Sometimes he still catches Souji doing… whatever that thing he does with his eyes is, that look that Yosuke’s always both loved and hated because it slices so swiftly and surely through everything—air, wood, concrete, thrice-reinforced steel, any pretense Yosuke can think to throw up like a wall around himself. It’s a look he knows well, and Yosuke can count three times that it’s happened in the last three days—once by the shrine, once at the popcorn stand, once just as Yosuke’s head broke the surface of the water with saltwater in his nose and a strangled, gurgling noise issuing from his mouth.

Souji never comes after him, though, never draws up next to him to ask what this is all about. Even if he can. Even if he probably has a right to, Yosuke thinks. It’s a small mercy, because he probably wouldn’t have any idea how to answer, if Souji ever did ask.

Questions, in general, are tiresome things to deal with these days. On the way home from Shichiri, Yosuke eases up on the gas, drops down through their little formation until he’s cruising in time to Kanji’s pedaling and Teddie’s rapidly pumping rollerbladed feet. This is, in its way, another small mercy, because those two are so out of breath with the exertion that they can’t ask him what he’s doing all the way back here.

Most days he loves the wind on his face, but just this once he’d rather go slow. 

 

* * *

 

Souji’s not sure if it’s luck or providence or some cosmic force’s idea of a bad joke that lands the two of them (finally) alone together on the fourth night. Dojima’s working late again, so his friends gather together in the living room for their traditional keep-Nanako-company dinner, and there’s something so contrived it’s almost funny about the fact that it’s him and Yosuke who draw the short straws for cooking duty.

If it guarantees a non-toxic, edible dinner for them all, Souji thinks, directing his small, wry smile to the pots that he’s rinsing, maybe an hour or so of awkwardness won’t be so bad. He hasn’t had the chance to find out if the girls have made any headway in the learning-to-cook department over the last few months, but just the thought is enough to send his stomach lurching and roiling fit to burst. He decides that the less he (or anyone within a hundred-mile radius) knows about this particular development, the better, and for what it’s worth Yosuke seems to agree, because their first joint decision since Souji’s return is to post Kanji by the dining table to guard against any unwanted interventions.

The only problem is that now he and Yosuke are locked together in that little rectangle of space, with nothing to distract them from each other but a small pile of vegetables and a package of chicken breast defrosting in the sink.

“So…” It comes as a surprise that Yosuke speaks first, but he lets the word trail, hand on the back of his neck like he’s a kid who’s been caught sneaking snacks from the fridge. “Curry rice?”

“Yeah.” It’s a recipe Souji knows back to front, and the cooking will, at the very least, give them something to talk about. “Could you cut the carrots, maybe? I’ll put the water on.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Kanji’s back looks like a wall, and the living room beyond him seems strangely far away. If he looks over his shoulder Souji knows he’ll see their friends talking all over one another in front of the TV in the living room, slouched on the sofa or stretched out across the floor, Nanako perched on Naoto’s lap, but even the sounds of their conversations and the daily weather report drift over slowly, too slowly, like they need to travel to where he stands.

At the stove, the water boils over. Souji opens his mouth. 

“Yosuke—” 

“Hey, partner—”

They stop again, brought up short by their own voices. They glance at each other across the counter, eyes flicking to one side, then away again, back to the much more manageable tasks of cutting and measuring.

“Sorry,” Souji says. All this hedging is so ridiculous he almost wants to laugh. “You go first.”

“No, you started. What did you want to say?”

What  _did_ he want to say? Nothing, honestly, besides Yosuke’s name, but no one needs to know that.

“Let’s just talk later, okay?” Souji says, and he wonders if Yosuke remembers the echo of his own voice through the phone, speaking those same words, the soft crackle of static stretching taut like a wire between them. “Feels like we haven’t had time to at all.” 

“Yeah, sure.” Yosuke’s concentrating unusually hard on cubing the carrots, but when Souji sneaks a quick glance at his mouth there’s a flicker of the old smile there. After four days, it definitely feels like something.  “We can talk after dinner, maybe.”

After four months of seemingly immeasurable distance, the kitchen feels too small, the space from one end of the kitchen counter to the other much too narrow for two boys making curry rice. They keep bumping elbows, brushing hands as they pass each other knives and wooden spoons and carrots and potatoes, and at each point of contact Souji can feel the thrum of his own heartbeat everywhere from the pit of his throat to the space between his ears.

In spite of all the things he’s no longer certain of, he thinks he’ll still miss everything about this. Even now, when it’s all still right in front of him, he misses it.

 

* * *

 

He’s been avoiding getting caught alone with Souji for four days, but Yosuke finds he’s somehow still the last one to leave when dinner finishes up and their friends trickle back to their houses one by one. Force of habit, he thinks, as Souji walks him out to the gate and they pause almost as one, wordlessly, in the pale circle of light from the streetlamp.

Then again, he did promise— _Let’s talk later._ It’s something that, if he’s being honest with himself, he’s been promising Souji for months, and he hates himself for it more than Souji must hate him by now.

“You going straight back to work as soon as you head home?” he asks, tries for a jaunty lightness with the question—fails, probably, because how stupid is it to open a conversation with the thing you least want to talk about? “Extra classes, and all that?”

“Yeah, it’s going to be tough when entrance exam season starts.” Souji’s hand comes up and rubs restlessly at the back of his neck, fingers digging a little into the skin, working at the knots in the muscle there. “I hear you’ve been working hard too.”

“You’ll be perfect as usual, I’m sure.” He knows this for a fact, because Souji’s always been perfect. It’s like saying the sky is blue, that Inaba is 637 kilometers (eight and a half hours by car, six hours by train, roughly 137 hours by foot if you’re stupid, according to Google Maps) from Tokyo City, and that Yosuke will always, always kick himself for having these awful thoughts. “But you know me, I’m just chugging along.”

“Let me know where you’re applying, if you want? I’m still filling out apps myself, so maybe we can figure stuff out together.”

 _Together?_ The word sounds like glass shattering in his head— _together, together._

“Ah, who knows where I’ll end up.” Here Yosuke tries a laugh—fails, again, and what comes out is instead a strangled, broken little noise. “You don’t have to dumb yourself down for me.”

“It’s not—”

“Really, man.” Yosuke tells himself he’s not being an ass and interrupting because he’s scared of whatever might be on the end of that sentence, but there’s a weird shadow that crosses Souji’s face then. He looks stung. No, must be some kind of trick of the light. “With your grades, you could even go overseas, if you wanted. You could make it anywhere.”

“So could you.” It sounds like a challenge—the words all steel, without a trace of irony. There’s no punch line. Yosuke doesn’t need to look at Souji to know that he’s doing that thing with his eyes again, watching and measuring and piercing. “I know you could.”

Could he make it, really? Does it count as working hard if he doesn’t even know what it’s for? If that’s what Souji believes, then it must be a different Yosuke he’s imagining—and it aches, dammit, to realize that he can’t look at himself with Souji’s eyes, can’t fathom for the life of him what Souji can possibly see.

“I’m not so sure,” Yosuke says. It’s the only way he knows how to say he doesn’t want Souji to keep leaving—or that he’s not sure he believes in himself enough to keep chasing, for all that Souji’s always said that he’s got the wind at his heels. Or that these little seasonal intersections aren’t enough, haven’t been enough since he left the first time, because, to tell the whole truth of it, Yosuke wants  _together_ more than he wants to breathe sometimes. The problem is that at every pass in his imagination  _together_ only ever means grabbing Souji by the shoulders and shaking him and telling him to stay, to drop everything and everyone and to please just stay.

That would be selfish, wouldn’t it?

“I don’t know if I can.”

“If that’s what you believe,” is all Souji says. He’s made his voice gentle, flat, a blank sheet of paper. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.”

Yosuke’s used to the sight of Souji’s back by now, so it jars him when he doesn’t go back into the house, just leans his shoulder a little against the gate, arms crossed over his chest even if the night is warm. It’s weird to be the one who turns around, eyes to the ground and mumbling “G’night” so softly Souji probably can’t even hear him. It’s weird to imagine that Souji’s the one who stays this time, standing haloed by the watery light, watching Yosuke walk away.

 

* * *

 

Because Souji won’t be staying for the summer festival, they have their own small one on the seventh night, by the river. As soon as it gets dark the yukatas come out, and the sparklers, and the biggest watermelon Yosuke can get his hands on. He shows up at the flood plain after an extended work shift with it cradled in his arms like an oversized baby, red-faced and puffing, nearly falling over from the exertion.

At Nanako’s insistence— _You promised,_ she reminds them, plaintively,  _and we didn’t get to do it last year—_ they put the watermelon down on a picnic blanket, and take turns laying into it with an old bokken she and Souji have unearthed from the Dojimas’ storage room. After Naoto finally splits it open with her typical deadly accuracy and a surprising amount of strength given her size, they sit in a circle on the ground and pick at the chunks, fingers and mouths rapidly growing sticky and pink-stained with juice.

Now Kanji and Teddie are taking turns running up and down the bank with Nanako on their shoulders, while the girls light the sparklers on the pebbly ground near the water. Souji lies back in the grass, legs crossed, arms folded behind his head, and watches the yellow light flower from the ends of their hands, crackling and fountaining down onto the wet stones.

“Is this, uh, this patch taken?”

The sound of Yosuke’s voice somewhere above him is such a surprise that Souji almost startles up out of his formerly comfortable position, tangling himself up in the process in his own arms and legs. But he looks up, taking stock of the downward curve of Yosuke’s tentative little half-frown in the light of the yellow moon, and recovers.

“Not at all,” he says. It’s a small relief when Yosuke settles down in the grass an arm’s length away, arranges himself into a position that’s the mirror-image of Souji’s—legs crossed, arms behind head. “Penny for your thoughts?”

Yosuke doesn’t answer right away—this in itself is something for Souji to wonder at, from the guy whose mouth usually moves a mile a minute, much too fast for the rest of him to be able to catch up. Even his voice sounds different when he finally speaks. It’s lower than Souji’s used to, weightier somehow, but he leans his head a little sideward and tunes himself in to this new frequency. The laughter and the boisterous voices and the crackling hiss of the sparklers in the background fade to nothing but soft, humming white noise.

“Hey, did you mean what you said? At your house, I mean. On Thursday.”

“Which part?”

“Well, all of it.” The grass rustles softly as Yosuke shifts. “Does it even matter if we go to the same school?”

“It matters to me,” Souji says, carefully neutral, so as to avoid coming off too earnest, too eager, all at once. “It’s all right if it’s not the same for you, though.”

His eyes don’t miss the way Yosuke’s back suddenly goes flat against the ground, a straight, rigid line, as if some invisible hand has pushed down hard against his chest. “Why does it matter?”

Why  _does_ it matter, though?

If he stops and thinks about what he wants to tell Yosuke he realizes it’s extraordinarily terrifying. More terrifying in some ways than dying, because for all the near-death experiences in his memory Souji can at least be sure they were facing each one down side by side. More terrifying even than the future, and Souji can think of more than one person who’d laugh in his face to know that the thing that scares him most in the world is the idea of a future that he and his best friend don’t share.

“Because I—” Souji starts to say, but then clamps his lips shut, swallows his answer right back down, because he’s only just barely caught his own mouth moving a mile a minute and he had already been halfway to saying  _I don’t want to be without you anymore._

“Do you really want to go it alone?” he asks instead, slowly, quietly, every word coiled tight like he’s still not sure if he should be speaking these things aloud.

“Well, no, but I—” Yosuke starts to say, but then he stops, and it goes quiet between them again. Nanako’s laugh sounds like bells ringing on the other side of town, too far away.

“Sorry. Way to kill the mood.” Yosuke rolls onto his side. His spine curves inward now, his shoulders hiked up high around his ears as if to protect them; now that Yosuke’s not looking at him, Souji follows the lines with his eyes. “Don’t mind me, I’m being an ass.”

“You’re not—”

“Just do what you think is best, okay? You’ll still have us, no matter what.”

Souji wonders briefly if Yosuke keeps interrupting him because he’s scared of what he might say. But sure, he thinks, he’ll still have them. He knows he’ll always have them, as surely as he knows that his heart beats. Will he still have Yosuke, though?

It’s selfish to think that, of course, so the question goes unasked.

“I’ll do my best,” Souji says. It’s a statement, not a promise. “You do the same.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suppose wild canon-divergence starts here because must skate quietly away from P4A and P4AU and the wonderful happy bubblegummy wasteland that is P4D for maximum pineage (!!!!!!).
> 
> (Really these kids need a break from having to save the world every few months.)


	7. a separate idea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If there’s anything the past year has taught him, it’s that all sorts of creatures make their hiding places in the human heart.

Supermarkets are difficult places to be nowadays.

There’s a Junes branch a couple of streets down from school that he’s contemplated visiting more than once, for the nostalgia, but he doesn’t think he can handle the sound of that song in his ear. Never mind that back when everyone at Yasogami was whining about how much they hated it, he actually thought it was pretty cute, and catchy as far as corporate jingles went. In retrospect, that might have been Nanako rubbing off on him—now just imagining the melody line gives him headaches so fierce he needs to stop and press his palms hard against his closed eyes.

Instead he does all his groceries at a smaller store two buildings away from home. He’s willing to risk the possibility that Yosuke would be upset with him for backing the competition; the potential ire is easier to deal with than the tricks Souji knows his imagination would try to play on him if he ever so much as stepped through the doors of Junes. Doing the groceries, even for a household of one, is draining enough without having to look extra hard down aisles and around corners, half-searching for a familiar head of brown hair.

It doesn’t need to be Junes, though. Sometimes it’s something different. Sometimes it’s still a song—something upbeat, with fancy guitar licks, or a hook he can imagine Yosuke humming under his breath for days. In such instances he’ll pull out his phone to Google a particularly memorable lyric, right then and there so he doesn’t forget, and wonder what stops him from keying the title and the artist into a new text message and adding, _Hey, listen. Listen to this._

“Senpai, are you still there?”

It’s at such times that Souji finds himself thankful for distractions.

“Sorry,” he says. “I got caught up in choosing tomatoes. What were you saying?”

“I see.” Souji can hear the rustling of papers in the background as Naoto sorts case briefs and incident reports, and the siren-wail of telephones ringing behind that, and voices barking instructions to one another across what he imagines is a quite crowded, cluttered office. The sound of her voice in his ear skims smoothly above all that noise, unperturbed and slightly skeptical, as unflappable as it’s ever been. “It seems Rise-san’s been detained for an extra voice lesson. Would you mind terribly if dinner was only the two of us?”

“No, not at all.” Two is still more than one, after all, and Souji’s tired of staring at the circle of empty chairs around his dining table. “I’ll make pasta and it’ll be Rise’s loss.”

“I should probably stop for doughnuts after work, then.”

“Such a cop.” He smiles fondly, but there’s something weirdly sobering about the blast of cold air that hits him as he walks by the frozen goods section. “It’ll be good to have you over. It’s been kind of hard to be alone at home, to be honest.”

“Hmm? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary, besides my bad habit of thinking too much. Some days it’s hard to even tell my right hand from my left. But, hey, sorry, am I disturbing your work?" 

“It’s fine; I’m not doing much more than alphabetizing these reports.” More rustling paper, and a slight upward lift to the end of that sentence—the way Naoto sounds when she smells a mystery. “I suppose you could chalk that low mood up to the seasons changing. Or could it be you’re still thinking about the altercation that happened over the summer?”

Way to cut right to the chase. He’s always liked talking to Naoto because hers is a brand of logic that he understands, and because he can trust her to treat problems like puzzle pieces, to sit down with him for hours mulling over clues and configurations until they finally arrive at an answer. At the same time, he finds he almost regrets confiding in her about this particular problem. He’s never been the direct object of her scrutiny before, and no amount of time spent theorizing about it could have prepared him for how small and soft and fragile it makes him feel.

“It was hardly an altercation. We didn’t even really say anything to each other.”

“And there’s the rub. It’s highly unusual for the two of you to struggle so much with communication, given the way you… are.” It’s definitely the detective instinct not to mince words. In Souji’s imagination the white fluorescent light of the supermarket shifts, transforms into the glow of a single bulb hanging from the ceiling of a cramped, windowless interrogation room. “Or were. Could it be that something’s changed?”

“Maybe, but I don’t know what.” It’s honestly a little upsetting how _I don’t know_ is the only honest response he can conjure up for a lot of things these days. “I don’t even know what he wants. _He_ says he doesn’t know what he wants.”

“Did you ever tell him what _you_ want?”

On the subject of what exactly it is he wants, Souji insists to himself, wild horses couldn’t drag the answer from him. Neither could Naoto, even if she summoned him down to the station, groceries and all, and held him at gunpoint. He thinks. Maybe.

“Not in so many words, no. But is that even an issue here? What I want, I mean.”

“It is, in that I know you’re hoping that your wishes and his are aligned. The difficulty being that you’re reluctant to confirm this with him directly, for fear of being selfish.”

It sounds so simple to hear her say it. “Am I so obvious?”

“I’m merely telling you what I see. Although I do understand that it’s sometimes easier to perceive these things from a distance. Of course some distortion is to be expected when you’re standing too close to something.”

Souji really, really doesn’t want to talk to anyone—not even Naoto—about closeness. He doesn’t even want to think about being too close, or not being close enough, or all the different kinds of close you can be to another person—to the right person, maybe? Is that even possible? (No, he always tells himself. It’s the logical thing to assume. No, it couldn’t be.)

“What if I already have a sense of what the answer might be, though?”

“A theory,” Naoto’s voice is as crisp as the fabric of her perfectly tailored dress shirts, “no matter how well-reasoned, is only a theory until you put it to the test. But that scares you, I imagine.”

It does, more than anything. He knows it shouldn’t, that it’s absurd to be so dismantled by the thought of opening his mouth and saying aloud how he feels, when they all did battle with a goddess together just this spring. He can hardly imagine that this strange unspoken problem-but-not-problem of him and Yosuke would be more daunting.

But, then again, if there’s anything the past year has taught him, it’s that all sorts of creatures make their hiding places in the human heart.

“Have I ever told you how irritatingly smart you are sometimes?”

“A simple deduction.” Naoto chuckles. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”

“Those doughnuts had better have sprinkles on them,” Souji warns, half-hoping she’ll actually feel his glare through the phone. It’s the least she can do for putting him on the spot like that.

 

* * *

 

Suspended, lost somewhere in the haze of changing colors between summer and fall, Yosuke finds he can’t remember when he started coming home to ice cream. 

He only remembers it being fairly innocuous at first, just a couple of extra Topsicles from the store in the freezer that he could chalk up to Teddie’s incessant cravings. Then what plays in his imagination is an animated montage of the pages flying off his calendar, the leaves of the trees along the riverbank losing their green and going golden and orange and brown, the door of the refrigerator in the Hanamura kitchen opening to reveal Topsicles becoming pints, pints becoming small tubs, then bigger tubs, and when, oh, when did Teddie start getting into the habit of downloading cheesy American romantic comedies with wonky subtitles?

“I hope you pay for all the crap you buy,” he finally gripes on a particular Saturday evening that he comes home from cram school feeling like all the possible variations of zombie, only to find Teddie curled up on his bed with a tub of Rocky Road and _Ten Things I Hate About You_ on his laptop screen. “Or at least let them take it out of your paycheck.”

“I would never cheat Junes out of its precious ice cream, Yosuke!” Teddie hits the pause button, and the pretty blonde girl onscreen freezes midway through the act of tearing a poster off a wall. (Yosuke finds himself thinking, momentarily, that he knows how that feels.) “Sometimes Yumi-chan pays for me.”

“Oh god, Ted, what are you sponging off Yumi for? If she quits on us that’s one less person who’s willing to work weekends!”

“She won’t quit. Yumi-chan and I have a special relationship, and what’s a little hole in your wallet when your heart is full of _love_?” It’s scary how Teddie can shovel a small mountain of the stuff into his mouth and speak around it without betraying a single sign of brain freeze. Maybe it’s not a problem shadows have. Or, well, former shadows. “And anyway you know I do it all for you!”

“Say what?” Yosuke’s about halfway through unpacking his backpack when he hears this, and the unexpected revelation nearly sends all his textbooks crashing down onto his unprotected feet. “What are you doing for me?”

“Everything.” Teddie gestures emphatically with the spoon, scattering a small shower of melted ice cream droplets across the bedspread. “The ice cream. The movies. My wonderful company. Is all this not enough to fix your broken heart? It’s been months.”

Talk about a curve ball. Yosuke has to stop himself from poking gingerly at the left side of his chest, feeling around for glass shards or loose screws. Granted, it’s not something he pays much attention to very often, but the last time he thought to check, his heart was fine. Functional. Pumping blood, beating, ticking away inside him like always. Nothing unusual there—except maybe the occasional murmur, the occasional skipped beat around certain trigger words like _college_ and _Tokyo_ and _Souji._ Maybe more than occasional, given that increasingly more of his weekends have been spent filling out forms and making routine trips to the post office, and pointedly avoiding calling a certain number that he keeps forgetting to take off speed-dial. It's not like Teddie needs to know these things, of course.

“Ted, what are you talking about? My heart’s not—”

“Don’t lie to me, Yosuke!” The movie stays paused as Teddie flings his arms in the air before dramatically bringing both hands close to his chest, still clutching the spoon. “You barely eat or sleep. There are shadows under your eyes darker than the ones in your soul, and I know you’ve been throwing yourself into work and school to hide the fact that you’re p-p-pinning for—”

“Pinning?”

“That’s what Yumi-chan said it was called!”

He’d forgotten that Yumi had returned to the drama club. This is a conversation that’s too exhausting to have standing up, so Yosuke half-sits, half-tumbles into his swivel chair, a messy, disastrous tangle of legs and arms. “I think the word you want is ‘pining.’ And I’m not doing that. My heart’s not broken.”

“It is! Yumi-chan says that people who do… all the things that you’ve been doing since spring have broken hearts! Or hearts that are at least a little cracked!” At this point Yosuke stops attempting to interrupt this Teddie-tirade on heartbrokenness and instead wonders just how much Teddie has told Yumi Ozawa (of all people!) about what goes on in his personal life. Or, rather, what Teddie _thinks_ goes on in his personal life. While on the job, no less. “Sensei’s not dead, you know. He just goes away from time to time, but he always finds his way back to us.”

Triggered: _Souji._ At which point Yosuke’s otherwise normal, perfectly functioning heart speeds into overdrive, skipping not just one beat but more like five, tripping, falling all over itself like Yosuke himself did that one day he crashed his bike—which, by some twist of fate, some loophole in the laws of motion, was also the day they met.

“Wh-what makes you think this has anything to do with Souji?” It’s something he’s been explaining away with being busy at work, with wanting to get into a good university—things that have much more to do with fixing his life enough to ensure a half-decent future than they have to do with Souji.

“Please, Yosuke, I’ve lived with you long enough to be able to tell where your mind goes when it wanders.”

That almost makes him sit up straight. He still never knows what to do or how to respond on the rare occasions that Teddie says things like this, things that remind Yosuke that Teddie’s birthplace was no more or less than the human heart. Honestly, it’s weird to hear such wise things from a person who only became a person by doing a ton of situps, whose body shows up as a blank space on x-ray machines. It feels even weirder to concede that while Teddie may not know anything about the English language, or saving money, or keeping his mouth shut, he does know a thing or two about hearts. Yosuke’s in particular, it seems, by virtue of having lived together this long.

“If you could just get your nose out of those bolology books for five minutes and call him,” Teddie goes on, oblivious, jabbing the spoon in Yosuke’s direction like he wants to stab him with it, “I’m sure it’d be easy for the two of you to find each other again.”

“Okay, first of all, it’s _biology,_ and second of all—” Yosuke’s hand pauses on the cover of said biology book. It’s probably useless to try studying at this point, now that Teddie’s somehow managed to drag him kicking and screaming onto the let’s-talk-about-our-feelings train.

“I’m not sure if he even still wants to be found.”

“So why don’t you just ask?” It sounds easy when Teddie says it, easier even than the way he pops another heaping spoonful of ice cream into his mouth without fear of brain freeze or any other pains.

If he were to look down into the deepest recesses of his imagination, he knows he’d probably still see all those most important words run together into one amorphous mass—the characters that spell out _Souji_ and _future_ blurring until they’re almost the same thing. But that’s something he still doesn’t want to talk about just yet, not even with Teddie; instead Yosuke unfolds himself from the chair and slouches toward his bed, nudging bear and laptop and ice cream aside to make enough room to sprawl.

“Shut up and put the movie back on, Ted.”


	8. intricate with misguided journeys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Souji imagines the space between him and everyone he’s ever loved spread out on a map, a series of long red lines running jagged between a particular Point A and Point B. He imagines pointing, bridging provinces and countries and continents with his fingers, his thumb on the name of the town he wants to reach like that’s all it takes to touch it.

During the winter, everything quiets down. Everything, it seems, but the hail of questions rattling around inside Souji’s head.

He can’t help it, when everyone at school seems to be dealing in questions these days. The air is heavy with them, especially in the mornings before classes start, and in the afternoons after dismissal, and it feels increasingly like Souji can’t take a step without stumbling headfirst into the same game of conversational ping-pong about wants and plans and aspirations. Is he going to college, or will he start working immediately? Is he going overseas, or staying here, or something else? What schools? To study what? What does he want?

It’s almost enough to make him miss the way things were last year, because when you’re a ragtag band of heroes out to save a world that’ll never know precisely what you did for it, you don’t have to worry about what the right thing to do is. Or about whether or not what you’re doing matters. Or about this strange business of wanting things, because all you have to concentrate on is what you have to do.

(But, then again, whenever Souji catches himself boarding this particular thought train, he always tells himself that worrying about what you want to do with your life should be easier than worrying about staying alive, and the thought’s enough to keep him amused for a while, at least.)

“I think I’m going on to university,” he always says, and he’s thankful in these instances that he’s mastered the art of turning his face still and masklike—putting on the smile that’s meant to hide anything that he might feel. “It’s what my parents want, though I haven’t spoken to them yet about what courses I should pursue.”

This always silences the questions, however temporarily, whether he’s facing a classmate or a teacher or a career counselor. It’s a process he can repeat however many times, because it’s a trick most of the people he talks to can’t see through, and he’s always right about how quickly the conversations slide rapidly downward from here into sequences of gently nodding heads and soft affirmative sounds.

“But what do _you_ want to do, Souji?”

His mother is, unfortunately, not most people, and for all that her image on his laptop screen is blurry and pixelated he can tell she’s spearing him straight through with her eyes. Five seas and two immovable continents and thousands of kilometers between them and she’s still impossible to fool. Then again, she does have the unfair advantage of having brought him into this world—she probably knows all his tricks better than he does, for all that they spend, on average, more days of the year apart than together.

“I’m still kind of drawing a blank, honestly.” May as well tell the truth. He feels six years old again, clutching a live earthworm in his fist, hiding his muddy hands behind his back. “I’ve been staring at these forms for most of the evening.”

“Well, what are you good at?” There’s a bit of lag as the connection hiccups, but he’s sure she’s just rolled her eyes at him. “Besides everything.”

“Mom.”

“The fruit never falls very far from the tree, you know.” If she were physically present, she’d probably poke him in the ribs; the smug little smile she shoots him from the other end of the screen has pretty much the same effect. “Can I hear the funny-sounding ones again?”

“You just want a laugh,” he says, but obliges her, fanning out a few of the university leaflets from the stack that’s been rising steadily at a corner of his desk for the past months. “Mmmm. Family Life and Child Development. Bakery Science. Floral Management. Theme Park Engineering.”

“Those sound like they’re right up your alley. Especially that last one; doesn’t making rollercoasters sound exciting?”

“Mom, please.”

Her laugh echoes out toward him, crackling with static but still loud enough to fill the whole room. Then her face softens a little, and he likes that even less, because he generally does a good job of being okay with the fact that she’s not here until she looks at him with those eyes. “But, well, how about a less crazy kind of engineering? Civil, maybe—I mean, you’ve always been good at building things. Remember all those houses you used to make out of raw spaghetti noodles?”

That was forever ago, he’s about to say. But hey, says a small voice inside him. Building things. It’s not such a bad idea. Not so crazy as to be completely out of his reach.

“I’ll think about it,” he says, and smiles back at her—the real one, this time. “Now don’t you need to get to the lab? Just tell Dad I said hi.”

“Yeah, I probably should. I will.” Her face shifts out of frame then, and he can see her move, picking up the coat draped over the back of her computer chair, shaking out her long hair. Behind her, a labyrinth of piled papers and towering stacks of books. Yellow wallpaper. Flowers on the curtains. “But, hey, Souji?”

“Yes, mom?”

“Pick something you want, okay? You know, something that’ll make you happy.” There’s something weird about her voice that seems to hint at something beyond the question of what he wants to study. “Think about it well while you have the chance—then, when the time comes, try to trust your choice.”

She might as well be trying to tell him to build a rocket that’ll take him to the moon. “I will, I promise. I mean, we do only have about a week left to turn these in.”

“It’s going to be okay,” she says, and Souji thinks it’s funny how he didn’t realize he needed to hear that until it actually came out of her mouth. Suddenly it feels as though the world has pulled into itself, like her city has become his city and he’s hearing these things face to face, feeling the anchor of her hand settling on his shoulder and squeezing gently.

Suddenly there’s an embarrassing lump in his throat that’s impeding his ability to say goodbye to her properly, so he waves at the little window on his screen until it goes black.

He remembers his younger self, building things—spaghetti-noodle houses, bridges made of Lego, snow forts, sandcastles at the beach. He remembers, but that was years and years and years ago, and learning to construct roads and bridges and things will probably be infinitely more complicated. How to cover distances, fill in gaps, take two points on a map and imagine the infrastructure needed to connect them. Souji imagines the space between him and everyone he’s ever loved spread out on a map, a series of long red lines running jagged between a particular Point A and Point B. He imagines pointing, bridging provinces and countries and continents with his fingers, his thumb on the name of the town he wants to reach like that’s all it takes to touch it.

It’s easy to imagine folding the map to make Point A and Point B coincide. He knows that in the world outside of his imagination it’s harder, but, as he takes a deep breath and swallows hard and moves his own towering stack of textbooks aside to reach for his phone, he hopes that all the attempts matter.

 

* * *

 

“Hey, listen to this!” Chie says, prodding Yosuke in the back none too gently with the toe of one socked foot. He twists his upper body toward her irritably from where he lies, and she waves the pamphlet she’s holding, just one of the many miscellaneous college-related pieces of paper that they’ve scattered haphazardly across the floor of her room over the past hour of semi-panicked description-reading and form-answering. “You can get a BS degree in Floral Management.”

“What _is_ that?” One of Yosuke’s hands goes to the site of said prodding, rubbing furiously at the bruise that’s surely already begun to go purple beneath his shirt. “You manage… flowers?”

“Flower _shops._ That sounds like something you could do. It’s already in your name, after all.”

“Shut up.” He shoots her a withering glare that he kind of hopes will crack her face in two, and turns his attention back to the piece of paper in front of him. “My dad’s on the management team of a fairly powerful chain department store. Do you _think_ he’d take kindly to me telling him I’ll be studying to run a flower shop?”

“Well, what does he want you to do?”

“I dunno. Something sensible. Business Administration, probably. Or Marketing.”

“And what about you?”

“That’s fine by me, I guess. I don’t know. I mean, what are the chances I’ll even get in somewhere good?” It’s a sobering thought, sobering enough to make Yosuke cap his pen and bury his face in his folded arms with a soft whine. “My grades aren’t exactly anything to write home about.”

“Well, maybe, but you’ve been working so hard this year.” He can hear the grin fading from Chie’s voice, something that sounds frighteningly close to sympathy taking its place, and when she crawls toward him on her elbows and pokes at the side of his head with a fingertip, the touch is considerably gentler. “You even made the top twenty that one time, remember?”

He sighs, and doesn’t look up. So many people say that lately, that he’s been working so hard, but it feels more like shooting blindly, firing all his arrows outward in every conceivable direction while everyone else seems to have managed to speed theirs straight and true toward business plans and internships and scholarships and dreams. He’s trying not to be especially resentful about the fact that Chie and Yukiko are packing their happy joined-at-the-hip selves to Kyoto together in the spring—the former for the police academy, and the latter to study the tea ceremony and flower arranging and god knows what other skills one needs to run an inn.

“Have you told Souji which schools you’re trying for?” Chie again, feeling her way forward gingerly, like she knows she’s prodding at the sensitive flesh around a wound. “What your first choice is, at least? He’d probably wanna know.”

Souji again? Yosuke raises his head, the excuses already half-formed on his lips—that he hasn’t had the time, that he’s not doing any of this for Souji because what kind of clingy monster would that make him, that Souji’s probably already got his own plans, which will carry him miles out of Yosuke’s league, probably—but all of them fall apart when the phone on the floor next to him begins to ring as if on cue.

When Yosuke sees Souji’s name flash across his phone screen, it’s like momentarily forgetting how to breathe.

He and Chie stare at the phone and then at each other and then at the phone again, mouths gaping, stunned. There’s a nervous laugh, two awkward fumbling hands shoving the phone forward, backward, forward again—“Answer it!” Yosuke almost screams, and Chie fires back, “But it’s _your phone!”—_ but on the seventh or so ring something dangerous snaps into place inside Yosuke and his hand shoots down in deference to what must be the natural pull of the Earth. Before his mind can catch up he’s already answering, saying “Souji?” into the phone, throat tight like he’s needed this forever even without knowing that he has.

There’s silence on the other end of the line, and Yosuke can feel the adrenaline shooting through his body and making his head spin. There are no Shadows, no vengeful goddesses, just the intense fear that Souji’s simply misdialed, or that he’s already hung up.

“Souji?” he says again, feeling more than a little stupid.

The funny thing is that, when Souji finally speaks, Yosuke could swear he seems to be feeling a little stupid too. His voice is crackly with something that might not actually be static, but Yosuke’s not sure; he’s never heard Souji talk like this before.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. You’re busy. I’ll leave you to—sorry, this was a bad idea.”

“No!” It comes out as a half-shout, loud enough to echo. He sees Chie’s eyes widen, going round as saucers next to him and he clears his throat, swallows the panic. “No, it’s okay. What can I—what’s up?”

Another silence. Yosuke screws his eyes shut and tries to imagine what Souji might be doing. Is he also filling out his applications, maybe? Working on homework? Watching stupid cat videos on his laptop? Or could he maybe be as suspended as Yosuke feels, sprawled in the middle of the floor of an unfamiliar room, sorting papers, trying to make enough sense of things so as not to be a complete mess when entrance exams roll around in January?

“Waseda?” Souji asks, and that voice speaking that word sounds so close to Yosuke’s ear that it sends his stomach turning somersaults. It’s partly a question, but also partly a challenge, partly the echo of a promise from more than a year ago—equals, shoulder to shoulder. Yosuke remembers the him from back then, saying _I want you to hit me._ Has it really been so long?

He wonders who told. He shoots Chie a kind of crazed look—was that why she was asking? She’s the only one he’s ever spoken to at length about it. Or Teddie, who’s always had a habit of poking around at the stuff on his desk and in his school bag. But also, does it even matter now, right now? Right now he has the sound of Souji’s voice on the other end of a phone line wired straight to his heart, and he’s all out of excuses and he knows he needs to say something _._ Something real this time, so that when they hang up in a few minutes it won’t feel like just another departure.

“Waseda.” When he answers his voice is so faint it’s almost all air. He knows Souji hears him, hears that breathing quicken ever so slightly on the other end of the phone line.

 “Oh,” Souji says, and for the first time since he left Inaba Yosuke knows beyond a shadow of a doubt, just from the way he breathes, that he’s smiling. “That’s wonderful.”

 _You’re wonderful,_ Yosuke almost says, but that’s weird, and he’s not so far gone that he’d actually say such a weird thing aloud, especially not with Chie’s eyes already burning red-hot holes in the side of his head. _I’ll go to you this time,_ he wants to add, but it doesn’t feel right to be making promises quite yet. Instead, he licks his lips, swallows hard, and recasts it as a question.

“Does that mean I should wish us both good luck?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> zooming through this because i want so much to finish it now that the end is actually kind of in sight
> 
> also 10000000% convinced that souji's parents are wilderness explorers/superheroes/spies


	9. the shape of returns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Regardless of whatever it is that he might feel, Yosuke tells himself he’s not going to be like one of those people in the movies, like the boys between the pages of every single shoujo manga Teddie’s ever suckered him into reading, heart displayed so prominently on his sleeve it may as well be all decked out with neon lights.

Souji’s watched enough movies to be aware of all the storytelling techniques used to illustrate things falling together—the montage of short shots, so you can see how the heroes spend months training on mountaintops or crossing deserts or falling in love (even if they don’t know it yet, but the audience knows it because it’s easy to catch all those longing looks when you’re watching from the outside), all in the span of a three-minute musical interlude. A lively piano instrumental, probably. Or a rock song. Something with enough energy to carry both characters and audience forward from one important plot point to the next, pulling time and space together.

He knows that, when he looks back on this winter from some future day still yet to be determined, this is how he’ll see things unfold.

In late December, his parents use up a vacation leave to be able to spend New Year’s with him, arriving yawning and red-eyed at the door at 3 AM. Over the course of their two-week stay the bare round dining table becomes crowded with papers and coffee cups and boxes of chocolate with the nutrition facts in French, and it’s honestly surprising how fast Souji finds himself falling back into step with this rare rhythm.

“Dad fell asleep again,” he says, on the fourth consecutive night he’s had to draw a blanket over his father’s shoulders and carefully pull off his glasses, stowing them to one side.

“Just leave him. He’ll wake up again as soon as he dreams up the answer to whatever problem he’s working on.” His mother grins across the table at him between sips of coffee, a quick flash of white teeth in the light. “Come here and let me look at you.”

It’s a bit of an odd request, but he obliges, crossing the room to stand beside her. When she turns her eyes on him it’s a bit of an odd feeling too—like having a pair of scanners run up and down his face and mark out with unparalleled speed and precision his eyes, his nose, the set of his chin. (He’s heard similar things said of the way he looks at people sometimes but he’s never quite been able to imagine what it feels like until now, so maybe it’s true what they say about the fruit never falling far from the tree.)

“You look happy,” she says. “You trusting those choices you made?”

He’s already worked out the particulars with her—with both his parents, actually, the three of them gathered around this table like a proper family for once, albeit messy and coffee-stained and just a bit crazy. The particulars, at the moment, involve one more vacation leave in March, for Souji’s graduation. The week after will see them back on a plane, and Souji on a train to Inaba to watch his friends from Yasogami get their own diplomas. And if all goes well, then in April it’ll be hello to Waseda University and that engineering degree, with his best friend the future business major, “the boy from the emails.”

“Trying to,” he admits, because he always tells her the truth. “I hope it works out.”

When she reaches out her arm and drags him downward into a lopsided half-hug, something she hasn’t done since he was big enough to sit on her lap and the most important decisions of his life had to do with what snacks to bring to school the next day, he makes a face, but doesn’t pull away.

On the day of his entrance exam in January it’s snowing so hard that Souji’s not sure he can feel his fingers, much less manage enough dexterity to peel off his gloves and answer the test. The desk he’s sitting at is wobbly, the chair too small and too stiff against his back, but he’s no stranger to uphill battles of all kinds, and what’s a few hours of crushing discomfort when you’re reaching out for your future?

There’s also something comforting about the thought of Yosuke parking his bike outside the Okina testing center, hissing “Dammit!” at the snowflakes that settle on his hair the moment he pulls off his helmet, so in the last ten minutes or so before the proctors are due to enter Souji pulls out his phone and sends a message: _We’ve got this._

 _Let’s try not to die of frostbite,_ comes the immediate reply, and Souji almost laughs aloud in the sallow light of the testing room, because he didn’t realize it would be so nice to be an _us_ again, whatever that means.

On February 14th, Naoto and Rise show up at his door with chocolate.

It’s not exactly a surprise—even a kindergartener would have been able to read between the lines of Rise’s _SO WHAT TIME WILL YOU BE HOME LATER??????_ text from that morning—so Souji has three places set at the table, stew bubbling in the pot, and enough rice for three in the rice cooker long before the doorbell rings at exactly 7:30 PM. Still, he’s happy to have company, and so touched in particular about the chocolate—they’re both way too busy to be engaging in kitchen experiments in the middle of the week—that he cracks the boxes open right then and there for a taste test. (It’s wiser, he thinks, than letting them join the pile of similar small boxes and packages on his kitchen counter; he doesn’t miss the way Rise’s eyes zoom straight to it the minute she steps through the door, sharp enough to hack all that cardboard and flowery wrapping paper to ribbons.)

Naoto’s chocolates are smooth, perfectly dome-shaped, and bittersweet. Rise’s are a little lumpy, but surprisingly edible—just a bit spicy, but he can pass it off as an artisanal quirk. Souji has the good grace to compliment them both liberally, and pull the chairs out for them as he shuffles from dining room to kitchen to dining room again, putting the last touches on their midweek dinner for three.

“You need to tell him how you feel.”

Souji nearly drops the glasses he’s holding. He didn’t realize Rise, at least, had also been intending to talk business.

“Rise, I—”

Rise doesn’t seem to hear him. “You’ve got to do it on graduation day, and it needs to be big _._ Hollywood big. You need to run down the aisle shouting his name just as he’s headed up the stage to get his diploma. Then sweep him off his feet, like, whoosh! And then smooch him in front of everyone.”

She’s obviously given this a lot of thought; her hands are flailing, her eyes wide and a little glassy, like an artist in the throes of an otherworldly fit of inspiration. Souji and Naoto trade shifty glances, half-expecting her to pull a script and a fully mapped-out storyboard out of the tiny handbag hanging from the back of her chair.

“I could probably get an orchestra for you, too, if you wanted one,” she adds, like this is a minor detail, an afterthought they can easily scrap if they decide it’s not a sound creative decision. Souji, still kind of reeling from the sudden deployment of the word _smooch,_ shoots Naoto a look that can only be described as imploring.

“I’m not sure disrupting the ceremony is a wise course of action, Rise-san.” A delicate clearing of the throat, and Naoto’s fingertips come to rest lightly against the back of Rise’s wrist, tentative and placating. “The school may elect to hold Yosuke-senpai back another year.”

“Well, how would _you_ do it?” Forcefully, like it’s a perfectly serious question, and one of great importance, at that.

Naoto’s mouth drops open, and Souji needs to choke back a laugh as he begins to scoop the rice, because it’s a nearly superhuman feat to even imagine her confessing love to _anything,_ with the possible exception of her work. She fidgets under the blistering heat wave of Rise’s stare, pulls awkwardly at her tie and mumbles about how her personal approach to the situation is irrelevant, when the task at hand can only fall to Souji.

When Rise turns to him—her eyes daggers, daring him to tell her it’s not like that, or that he’s not going to do it _—_ he can only clear his throat and say, “I’ll have to think about it.” Does he really need to remind her that it’s taken months just for the two of them to go back to the way things were?

(Although, a small voice inside of Souji wonders, can he say with confidence that that’s what’s happened? That they’ve taken a step back, instead of forward?)

“You’re _always_ ‘thinking about it!’” Rise throws up her hands, adds, “I’m so tired of the two of you,” and for a moment no one’s sure whether she means she’s tired of Naoto and Souji, with all their stupid logic, or of Souji and Yosuke, with all their stupid fence-sitting. She’s pouting magnificently enough to deserve a spot on the cover of _Vogue,_ but her acting skills must have lapsed worse than originally anticipated over the course of her long break from the spotlight, because she still breaks easily enough into a fit of gleeful giggles when Souji sets a bowl of rice down in front of her and ruffles her hair.

 

* * *

Yosuke isn’t sure exactly when time started to move again for him. He can’t pinpoint the exact moment, only knows that it’s floating in his memory somewhere between the sound of Souji’s voice saying “Waseda?” and the sight of his own hands pushing the envelope containing his neatly folded-up application form into a mail slot—but climactic turning point or no, the rest of the winter feels like a movie that’s been put on fast-forward so the people watching can get to the good parts.

It’s a weird feeling, because for all that he’s wanted to believe he could be, he knows he’s no hero—has never been much more than a kid who manages to tangle himself up in all sorts of trouble as easily as blinking. But still, he feels it all the same, a wind at his back pushing him through the days. It’s still like there’s something inside him getting to its feet and breaking into a run, fueled by a sense of purpose he hasn’t felt since those bizarre murders they still talk about on the news from time to time.

At the dinner table, one evening sometime after Christmas, Yosuke tells his parents, “I’m gonna go to Tokyo.”

He doesn’t say that he wants to, or that that he’ll try to. He says he’s going to, and he’s just a little proud of the fact that his voice doesn’t shake when he does. It’s like there aren’t a million questions still running through his head at every idle moment of each day—questions of passing and academic survival and where to live and _holy shit where is Teddie even going to move to._ Maybe if he fakes it hard enough—sits up a little straighter, squares his shoulders just so—he’ll start to believe those questions actually have answers he can reach. Believe in himself, even, a little bit—because hey, it took forever, but didn’t he kind of manage to figure out what he wanted in the end? That’s one question down, at least.

He’s been prepping himself for an extreme reaction for days, but it still slams into him with the force of a hurricane—his dad exclaiming to no one in particular that the challenges of the past year have somehow managed to turn his son into a real man, his mom slumping into Teddie’s outstretched arms like her bones have suddenly turned to rubber. Between the shouting and the all-too-real threat of tears it’s almost impossible to get a word in, but he somehow manages it anyway, something about studying business like they said he should, perhaps renting out a small apartment in Shinjuku, if all goes well his best friend’s supreme good influence just a stone’s throw away—they remember Souji Seta, don’t they? (Though, if anything, the mention of Souji seems to make the frenzy even more… frenzied.)

All in all, it’s a miracle any of the food even gets eaten that night.

 _Told them at dinner,_ he texts Souji from bed later that night, squinting against the light from his phone screen. And, because he can’t quite believe it himself yet, and maybe it’ll help to see it written out, _They said they were proud of me._

He’s drifting off to sleep when Souji’s reply comes in: _Did you cry?_

What comes out of his mouth then is a slightly inhuman sound—part yawn, part laugh, part shout of indignation—accompanied by a sudden loosening of the muscles in his right hand that sends the phone dropping down with a loud smack onto his face.

 _You ass,_ Yosuke types, when he’s retrieved the offending phone, screwed up his face a few times to make sure all the important parts are still there. He’s almost sure a bruised nose will greet him when he wakes up, but he falls asleep smiling all the same.

Neither does he cry on that one unforgivingly snowy morning in January, when Teddie shakes him awake at 5:30, all but shouting that he needs to get ready for his exam. He stumbles down the stairs, blinking the sleep from his eyes and pulling his thickest coat on backwards and nearly running headfirst into Kanji’s chest—he reels back, still blinking a mile a minute, and sees his friends, stupid sleepy grins on their faces and a huge hand-painted cloth banner in their hands that reads _FLY HIGH YOSUKE._

Yosuke pauses, one hand still on the banister, mouth slack. “Did you guys really come here just to see me off?”

“Well,” Kanji offers, grinning, “Ted asked your ma if we could stay for breakfast.”

He doesn’t cry then, either, just shakes his head and says “gah” at the strangeness of it all. Then he hugs everyone quickly, one at a time before they can protest or before his courage gives out. He’d like to believe that the quiet laughter in his ears and the hands he feels patting his back or squeezing his upper arm encouragingly aren’t just panic-driven hallucinations; even Yukiko stops him post-hug to straighten his collar and go “Go get ‘em, tiger” in a way that would probably have made his heart skip a beat in a former life.

Not ten minutes later he’s on his bike speeding out of town toward the testing center in Okina, telling himself that it’s the cold and the moisture in the air that are making his eyes water.

The most surreal thing of all is probably the realization, which comes upon him well into the night on Valentine’s Day, that he hasn’t had a single thought about not being able to get a date. Instead he’s spent the evening watching more movies with Teddie, ploughing steadily through the one box of chocolate truffles they’ve received—a joint gift, but the sting is slightly alleviated by the fact that it’s from Nanako, and therefore more than edible now that she’s learned not to take cooking tips from Yukiko or Chie. (For what it’s worth, they also showed up at school today with boxes of chocolates for both Yosuke and Teddie, individually wrapped and beribboned. Those boxes sit now, untouched and slightly ominous, on Yosuke’s desk.)

“I think,” Teddie pipes up apropos of nothing, about halfway through _You’ve Got Mail,_ “you should give Sensei your second button on graduation day.”

“I should give him my _what?”_ It comes out first as a loud yelp, but luckily he’s quick enough to realize this and scale his voice down to a whisper. Can’t have his parents hearing and getting the wrong idea.

“Your second button,” Teddie repeats, dragging the syllables out with exaggerated slowness, throwing his hands up in the air when Yosuke continues to blink at him, uncomprehending. “You’re supposed to give it to the person that you love on graduation day, because the second button on the uniform is the closest one to the heart.” And here he places a hand, with the requisite Teddie-flourish, square on the left side of Yosuke’s chest, as if for emphasis. It’s warm. “I’ve read about it so many times. It’s a gesture that’s worth at least a million words!”

 _That’s a lot of words,_ Yosuke thinks, too bewildered to even swat Teddie’s hand away. Do people do things like that in real life? It seems kind of funny to pin all your hopes on a little metal circle that’s meant to hold your clothes together, and he honestly doesn’t think he’d be able to explain what the gesture means to Souji, even if by some miracle he did work up the courage to do it.

 _I don’t—_ he wants to say, but is there even any point in saying it aloud if he doesn’t know what’s supposed to go on the end of that sentence? Just thinking about it—tracing the shape the word _love_ makes in his mind, and that’s just one word out of the supposed one million—makes him want to melt into a puddle of sludge and embarrassment on the spot, because is that _really_ what this is? Isn’t there a less embarrassing way to say you’re starting to realize how much you hate the idea of being apart?

Regardless of whatever it is that he might feel, Yosuke tells himself he’s not going to be like one of those people in the movies, like the boys between the pages of every single shoujo manga Teddie’s ever suckered him into reading, heart displayed so prominently on his sleeve it may as well be all decked out with neon lights. He’s not going to be _that_ guy. Even for Souji he won’t.


	10. something intelligent about love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All he needs is ten seconds. Ten seconds of insane, embarrassing courage—something like the sun coming up in the TV world, the warm yellow light pouring down on them in floods.

It’s a lot easier to say when something ends rather than when it begins, because an ending is something you can spot from a mile away. It’s also something you can decide, to a certain extent—the last day, the last kiss, the last battle.

Beginnings, though, have a way of slipping up on you sideways, sitting unrecognized in shadowy corners, lulling you into thinking what you’re living through is just another moment, in just another day.

Souji’s phone rings at exactly 8 PM on Thursday, March 21: _Incoming call from Rise Kujikawa_. It’s been exactly one year, to the day, since he left Inaba.

“We’re not taking the train on Saturday,” Rise says when he answers. “Inoue-san says he can take us in an agency car, so we don’t have to worry about being late.”

“Wear your best suit,” she says. There’s an urgency in her voice that brooks no argument. “I want you looking sharp enough to cut glass.”

 

* * *

 

The night before his graduation finds Yosuke in his living room, standing at the ironing board over his uniform, wondering if he should wear a proper button-up shirt under the jacket for once.

It’s a special occasion, after all, something worth getting dressed up kind of fancy for. But when he fields the question to Teddie, sprawled supine on the sofa, watching him, he gets a negative.

“It wouldn’t be you,” Teddie says.

That’s true, too. It’ll be the last time he wears that uniform, his last day as an official student of that tiny, boring, annoying, wonderful school. He knows to expect the usual snoozeworthy speeches from all the same teachers, the god-awful school song blaring from the sound system in the auditorium, the cherry trees in the courtyard just starting to bud. He knows he’s in for all the usual things—only colored somehow differently, reaching him in softer focus, for the last time.

When he thinks about it, it doesn’t feel right to spend it not looking like himself. Yosuke decides Teddie’s right, and wonders when he got sappy enough to start counting lasts.

 

* * *

 

Souji wakes up just as they pull into Inaba.

There’s a cramp in his lower back from sitting for so long, and the lapel on the right side of his jacket is wrinkled where Rise leaned against it in her sleep, but none of that matters. The only thing that matters just at this moment is that when he raises his head to take in the river, the fields, the familiar low skyline he knows better than the lines on his own hand, the heart quickens inside him, speeding ahead toward home.

A hand touches his hair, smoothing the tousled bangs down. He turns, and Rise smiles at him. Then she puts a finger to her lips, gestures at Naoto’s head wedged against her shoulder, the soft snoring sounds she’s making the only noise to be heard under the steady hum of the engine.

 

* * *

 

“Please keep your head still,” Yosuke hears Yukiko pleading, over his shoulder. When he turns he sees that she’s standing next to Chie’s desk, bracing one hand gently but firmly against the side of her face, the other holding a dark brown pencil. “Do you _want_ raccoon eyes?”

“I’m trying!” Chie whines, but she still flinches anytime the pencil comes within a few inches of her eye, scooting backward in her chair and twisting her head away. They argue back and forth about this, and about whether or not you absolutely _need_ to have makeup on at your graduation, for another five minutes.

At one point Yosuke ducks his head downward, almost by reflex, and Chie’s windmilling arms miss it by a narrow margin. _Makeup looks painful,_ he thinks. And also, fondly, _These girls are crazy._

Ai’s doing her own makeup in the bathroom, so the desk in front of him sits empty. It’s just as well, because in his mind that desk’s always been Souji’s. He’s pretty sure that it’s never stopped being the four of them, the four of them and this classroom and everything in it, at least in his mind.

 

* * *

 

When Kanji comes to meet them at the door of the auditorium, all three of them almost fail to recognize him—his hair is combed down over his forehead, his uniform neatly pressed and all buttoned up, with a dress shirt underneath. There’s a ribbon pinned to his chest that says _Usher._

“Whoa, Kanji-kun!” Rise’s lipsticked mouth makes a small surprised o, and Kanji blushes all the way to the roots of his hair. “You clean up well!”

“Sh-shuddup and get inside!” He gets a dirty look from one of the teachers passing by and lowers his voice to a semi-conspiratorial whisper. “I saved you guys seats in the ushers’ section near the back. Just look for Ted. You can’t miss ‘im.”

Kanji doesn’t look at them as he holds open the door; his eyes stare off into the distance above their heads instead, just a bit misty when Souji looks close.

“It’s good to see you,” Souji makes sure to say, with a small smile, before he follows Rise and Naoto into the auditorium. He could swear he hears Kanji’s voice crack a little when he answers, “I’m s-so glad you made it, Senpai!”

 

* * *

 

“This is scarier than fighting Shadows,” Chie whispers.

Their graduating class is formed up in two straight lines in front of the auditorium, shoulder-to-shoulder, straight-backed as soldiers. It feels like forever before the teachers push the doors open, like several more centuries before they finally stand open all the way to allow the lines through.

“I think I need to pee.” Yosuke’s voice comes out in a small croak from behind her, and Chie’s snort of laughter is so loud it nearly banishes all the butterflies in both their stomachs.

“Want me to hold your hand?”

“Shut up! Hold hands with Yuki—ow!” Yukiko takes the opportunity to jab him in the back with her finger. That definitely, _definitely_ feels like it’s going to leave a bruise. “What’d you have to go and do that for?”

“Hanamura! Satonaka!” Ms. Sofue’s voice up ahead of them is a whipcrack. “Stand at attention!”

The lines begin to move, and they step forward.

 

* * *

 

Souji doesn’t realize he’s been dozing off—if there’s one thing that he’s absolutely certain hasn’t changed it’s the soporific quality of their principal’s speeches—until he feels Naoto shaking his shoulder, whispering that the reading of names is about to start.

“Don’t go crying on us now, Senpai,” she says, smiling. “After you acquitted yourself so admirably at your own graduation.”

Souji grins back and gestures further down the row at the others, who already seem to be going a little glassy-eyed. There’s a telltale twitch to Kanji’s jaw, and Teddie has a box of tissues ready on his lap like he’s been waiting for this. Rise sits sandwiched between them, holding both of their hands tightly in her own, lip quivering.

“I think they’ve got us covered,” he says.

On the stage in front of them, Ms. Sofue takes the lectern, the class list for section 3-1 in her hand. She doesn’t even make it through the “Ama—” in “Amagi” before a single tear edges past the floodgates of Teddie’s eyes and tracks a diamond-bright path down his cheek, and after that there’s no going back.

 

* * *

 

Maybe, Yosuke thinks as he rises to his feet in time to the steady beat of “Ha-na-mu-ra” being read into the microphone, he’s actually learned something since first coming to this school.

He probably looks a lot more cocksure than he feels, walking down an aisle that’s suddenly stretched the length of an ocean, but there’s no time for second-guessing when he feels the smooth firm cardboard in his hands. There’s something about that comforting weight, that cylindrical canister curving to the shape of his palms, that feels like proof—that all the screw-ups and false starts leading up to this point have been a test, one huge cosmic test, and even if he doesn’t know how he did it he must have passed _somehow_ , because he’s here.

When he turns to face the audience, he’s not prepared for how close everything looks. There are his parents, in the front row, and his classmates beaming up at him a few rows behind—Chie pumping her fist, Yukiko’s long graceful hands clapping. Then, further back still, near the door, a row of figures he can’t make out from this distance—standing up for him, raising one arm in salute, hands balled resolutely into fists. He thinks he can make out Kanji’s hulking silhouette, the shape of Rise’s pigtails, Naoto’s hat, the light on Teddie’s bright hair.

And Souji, too. Of course Souji’s there. Yosuke hopes he’s smiling, hopes more than he’s ever hoped for anything—with the possible exception of good entrance exam scores—that he’s smiling. That he’s thinking, if only very quietly to himself, _That’s my partner_.

There’s a lump in his throat—it feels a bit like he’s swallowed a baseball—but he’s not about to screw this up by crying when he’s come so far. Instead, Yosuke takes a breath, steps forward into the searing yellow glare of the spotlights, and bows.

 

* * *

 

All things considered, Souji thinks, it’s a miracle the teachers haven’t thrown them out by now. The box of tissue on Teddie’s lap is almost empty by the time the graduation song begins to play, the tissues themselves wadded up in balls and scattered all over the floor between their feet and under their chairs, and Kanji’s left sleeve is crumpled and damp where Rise’s seen fit to use it as a tear-sponge.

 “Will you quit your bawlin’!” he hisses at her through his teeth, but his face is wet too, and his eyes just a little red. “You’re gonna ruin that fancy makeup!”

“Excuse you, it’s waterproof!” she wails in turn, grabbing his arm and shaking it back and forth so hard Souji fears she’ll pull it out of its socket. “God, Moronji, you don’t know anything!”

All told, the three next to him are doing more wailing and bickering than singing, but Souji finds he doesn’t mind; it’s a welcome distraction from the knot he feels forming in his chest as he listens to the violins, to the hundreds of voices swelling to melody together. (If he closes his eyes and strains his ears he almost thinks he’ll be able to hear them, one by one, each with their own distinctive sound. Yumi, Ai, Kou, Daisuke. Chie, Yukiko, Yosuke. Especially Yosuke, his voice loud and brassy and bright as the lights beating down on all their heads. He knows he could, if he listened hard enough.)

“You ought to sing along with them, Senpai.” Naoto’s not letting him off the hook, but as she glances up at him he thinks her eyes have a shine to them that he’s never seen before. “It’s your school too, after all.”

“I can’t sing,” Souji whispers. It feels like a confession.

Naoto smiles. Then she does something distinctly un-Naoto-like; she reaches out and touches him lightly on the arm, and the warmth of her hand through the fabric of his suit jacket keeps him standing straight for just a little longer.

 

* * *

                                                        

Yosuke nearly yelps and jumps a foot in the air when Chie grabs his hand midway through the first chorus.

His first instinct is to wrench it away, yell at her to quit it because that’s for girls, but she’s gripping fit to break his fingers, and when he glances to the side he sees her shoulders heaving a little as she sings, like she can’t breathe. She won’t look at him—her face is angled resolutely away, so that he can barely see her mouth moving to form the words—but he gets it and holds on. After two years together, how could he not get it?

On his other side, Yukiko tugs at his sleeve, and this time he doesn’t hesitate. He reaches down to take her hand, finds it damp and clammy and shaking, and squeezes, but he doesn’t look at her either. It’s a contract, almost, an unspoken agreement that each of them knew as soon as they touched. They’ll keep their eyes forward until the music stops, and when it does they’ll let go, carefully wipe their sweaty palms on sleeves or skirt pleats or pant legs, and not talk about what it meant. (Because, really, after two years together, do you need to?)

Now they’re at that part in the second verse where they’re singing about how they’ll never forget each other, even if it’s now time to part ways, and Yosuke can’t help thinking this is all horribly, horribly contrived. Like the sort of thing you see in movies, when the whole world slows down as music starts to play, and the characters don’t have to say anything to anyone about how they might be feeling at the time because the song says it all. Something that never happens in real life.

But if this were a real movie, Souji would be with them there, wedged between Yosuke and one of the girls. Not singing, not crying, just holding on steadily, his hand around Yosuke’s more solid than anything else he knows. If this were a real movie, he could hold Souji’s hand for real, and not let go unless he wanted to.

 _But this isn’t a movie,_ a small voice inside of Yosuke says, as the music builds and swells, tugging his heart right along behind it. _And if you don’t tell him, he’s not gonna know._

 

* * *

 

Souji’s only about half-certain of the things that happen when the song ends and the graduates file out of the venue two-by-two, and parents and guests and teachers trickle slowly out the way they came.

He knows that what happens after the ceremony officially concludes is anybody’s call—there’ll probably be a lot more crying, some hugging, some yearbook signing. Lots of photos being taken around the school. People scrambling for ways to make good use of the time before it runs out completely, before the sun goes down and they have to walk out those gates and into their new lives, whatever those might involve.

Rise, however, apparently has a plan in mind now that she’s exhausted all her tears; she barely waits for the last pair in the class 3-3 line to clear the threshold before she hooks her arm through his and drags him toward the door. (Over her head, he sees Kanji shoot Naoto an uncharacteristically steady look, and Naoto nod briskly in answer before the two of them run for the exit on the far end, leading back into the main building, Teddie trailing along at a run behind them.)

“Where are we going, Rise?” he asks—it’s vaguely amusing how steady he sounds given that he’s nearly stumbling all over himself trying to keep up with her—even if he kind of already knows the answer. Given the way she thinks, it isn’t hard to guess.

“The gate!” She doesn’t even look over her shoulder. “There’s no time, Senpai! You have to confess your love!”

                                                                 

* * *

 

“Yosuke!” Chie yells as she and Yukiko tail him down the hallway toward the practice building, drawing a few concerned stares from the people milling about. “If you don’t go find him, if you don’t talk to him _right now,_ I’ll—”

“I will!” Granted, Yosuke’s not a thousand percent sure he’ll actually be able to—that his courage won’t give out at the last minute and send him running out the back door of the school building and all the way to Okina—but that’s precisely why he has to find Kanji before that happens. “I just—there’s something I gotta do first, okay?”

“Which is?” Chie walks right into a gaggle of girls having a group photo taken by the shoe lockers, but she ignores their indignant yells about being photobombed, and plows forward. There are a few more yells as Yukiko, trailing a few steps behind, inadvertently photobombs the second attempt. “What could be more important than seeing Souji? Are you gonna tell him today, or are you—”

 _Is_ he going to tell him today? And tell him what? Yosuke hasn’t even worked out the proper phrasing yet, honestly, because every time he thinks about it he can feel all the blood in his body rushing up to his head and pooling there, making his face burn so intensely he feels like a walking lighthouse. How much does he trust Teddie’s assertion that what he’s about to do will suffice, that it’s worth all the words in all the combinations he can possibly conceive?

“Yosuke-senpai!”

Kanji’s thundering voice, as well as the heavy drumbeat of his boots against the ground, startles the shoe locker girls so badly it ruins their third photo.

 

* * *

 

“… Are you scared?”

“Do you want me to tell you the truth?”

“You can always tell me the truth, Senpai.”

Rise’s eyes tell him that the truth had better not be that he’s so scared he doesn’t want to do this anymore, and that he’s just going to turn tail and lock himself in his room and have Nanako deliver his food through a cat flap installed in the door, so Souji clears his throat and simply says, “This is pretty scary, yes.”

“Scarier than the giant eyeball? Or than Izanami?”

“In some ways.” It sounds ridiculous, but he knew more about what he was up against with the giant eyeball. And with Izanami, even. “I’m starting to think it’s scarier than anything.”

“Listen,” Rises says, and here she stands up on tiptoe and takes his face between her two hands. It’s a conspicuous enough gesture to make a couple of hovering underclassmen blush and stare and whisper, but she pays them about as much attention as she does the dust on the ground.

“You’re in love with him, and he’s in love with you, and you’re going to tell him that when you look at him it’s like seeing the sun and the stars and—oh, hell, I don’t know—the Milky Way, and that you’re both idiots for staying apart this long, so you’re going to go to Tokyo together in April and never be apart again and live happily ever after.” She has to pause to breathe then, but her eyes never leave his face, and Souji thinks for a moment of her persona, and wonders if part of its power is seeing straight through into the hearts of things. “And then you can smooch him, if you want.”

Much as Souji _does_ want to—kind of, a little bit, even if he’ll never admit it to Rise, because he knows she’d never let him hear the end of it—it’s probably not a good idea for any smooching to happen here in the courtyard where everyone can see. He blinks at her. “You want me to say all of that?”

“What else is there to say? It’s simple.”

“It’s not _that_ simple,” he says, but all Rise does is shake her head and answer, “It could be. I'm telling you, it could.”

 

* * *

 

Yosuke’s familiar by now with the emergency sewing kit Kanji always carries in his pocket—the small purple pouch is probably handmade, the butterflies embroidered across it impossibly, impossibly intricate—and has seen Kanji himself rapidly sewing up rips and patching tears in the TV world, so they can make it out of Junes without having to explain why they’ve cut up their own clothes. Still, he thinks, he’s probably never been more thankful for that sewing kit, and for Kanji himself, than now, when the threads holding the second button to his jacket feel like the threshold between life and death, and his hands are shaking so hard he’d probably stab himself in the chest if he tried to snip through them on his own.

“You know,” Yukiko says, matter-of-factly, “you don’t seem to think much about anything else you say before you say it, so maybe you shouldn’t be thinking so hard about this.”

It’s meant to be comforting, and she’s patting him on the shoulder as she says it as a kind of bonus-consolation, but the only effect it has is to intensify Yosuke’s wish that the ground open up from underneath him and swallow him up and maybe regurgitate him after a hundred years have passed. What is he supposed to do? What does he say? Is there a formula he can follow for not screwing this up?

“Just tell him you love him!” Chie insists—this isn’t the first time she’s told him that, but the sound of the word _love_ still sends chills down his spine. He’s at least spared from having to answer by Naoto carefully interjecting, “I think ‘love’ may be a bit hasty for a first attempt.”

Then Kanji’s finished poking and snipping, and the sewing kit has disappeared back into the folds of his own jacket, and the button is being pressed into his hand with a “Now shut up and go get your man, Yosuke-senpai!” and Yosuke feels his bloodstream changing direction and rushing down to his feet because it’s not as if Souji’s _his—_

“There’s no time, Yosuke! Love awaits!”

Then Teddie’s hands descend with unnatural strength on Yosuke’s shoulders and pushes and suddenly they’re running—they shouldn’t be running in the hallway—booking it for the door with an urgency that’s almost terrifying, and the chorus of cheers that erupts from behind him is so loud it’s almost enough to drown out the panicked screaming in his head.

 

* * *

 

Souji’s not sure where Rise slips away to without a word of notice or goodbye, how she manages to do it without him noticing. He can’t tell what the commotion is by the door of the school building either, at least not right away. He sees running and stumbling and two sets of arms flailing, but then one figure breaks away from the other and continues forward at a kind of lurching, zombie-like half-run, and it’s impossible not to recognize the brown hair, the lanky frame.

Then Yosuke finds his balance, slows to a walk and stands upright. When he lifts his head and meets Souji’s eyes he half-expects everything around them to shift into tender slow motion, for the cherry trees in the courtyard to suddenly burst into bloom a month too early to the sound of several hundred invisible violins, because it’s _that_ bad. Souji’s here, standing framed by the gate that they’ve walked through together hundreds of times, and he’s beautiful—in a way that Yosuke’s certain boys aren’t supposed to be, but he is—and walking toward him feels like coming back from the dead, almost.

“Hi,” Yosuke says, when he draws up close. That’s one word down, and many more to go.

“Hey,” Souji answers. It’s a small word, but he’s smiling so wide his cheeks are aching, and he’s pretty sure that if he saw his own face he wouldn’t recognize himself—he can’t even summon a fraction of the self-restraint needed to school it into something more moderate. “Congrats.”

“Partner, I have to—” _I have to tell you something,_ it’s supposed to go, but the sight of Souji’s smile is taking that sentence and twisting it up into a knot halfway between his brain and his mouth, and what comes out instead is, “Ugh, screw this. Gimme your hand!”

Souji tilts his head. He’s not sure what he was expecting—there are likely as many possible permutations of this conversation as there are buds on the branches of the cherry trees, but this is one he hasn’t anticipated. Still, he remembers Rise holding his face, forcing him to look hard, forcing him to see— _it could be, I'm telling you, it could—_ and extends his hand.

“What’s this all about?”

Yosuke finds he’s spent so much time quietly studying those hands that he’s disturbed at how well the image aligns with the one in his head—the long fingers, the web of lines on the palm, the curve of the joint that connects it to his wrist—and his head spins with panic. There’s still time, there’s still time to high-five him jokingly and run away, and he can pretend this never happened—

But also that’s Souji’s hand, Souji’s _hand_ stretched out toward him, and could it really mean that Yosuke’s not the only one who’s been waiting for this, turning the idea of this moment around in his head over and over again?

All he needs is ten seconds. Ten seconds of insane, embarrassing courage—something like the sun coming up in the TV world, the warm yellow light pouring down on them in floods. Yosuke breathes, something inside of him leaps, and he slams that button into Souji’s hand with so much force that it may as well be his heart for real.

“I like you, dammit! I’ve liked you forever!”

And then, just like in the movies, the world stops.

There are a number of things that suddenly become clear to Souji after Yosuke beats him to the punch. The first is how loud Yosuke’s voice is, even in this open space—he sees a number of heads snapping toward them, jaws dropping open as group photos are interrupted, the underclassmen gasping and whispering about this senpai randomly hollering love confessions. The second is how Yosuke’s face is probably the very mirror image of his own right now—eyes wide and staring, panicked, screaming _Say something!_ The third is how fast Yosuke’s hand jerks away from his, like Souji’s burnt him, darting behind his back to hide even as the rest of him stands frozen, rooted to the spot.

The fourth, the thing he knows so clearly in this moment he can’t even imagine how he didn’t know it before, is that he’s not going to let go of that hand again. His left hand is holding the button—the one closest to the heart, he remembers—so it’s the right one that shoots out now to take Yosuke by the wrist, skin on skin beneath the fabric of his sleeve.

“Wh-what are you doing?”

Yosuke’s voice comes to his ear from far away, echoing faintly, bewildered and disbelieving, but Souji smiles.

“You said I should do what I think is best,” he says, and pulls.

As his steps lengthen and he bolts forward through the gate, tugging Yosuke along behind him, Souji knows—he doesn’t have an answer right now, not in so many words. For once there are no quips or jokes or bald, deadpan statements ready, not for this. But Souji also knows, bone-deep with every inch of achingly familiar, beloved ground that falls away under their feet—the truth is, there  _are_ no sufficient words for the certainties he’s suddenly found himself clutching in his two hands. There’s nothing more telling than the fingers of his right, curled so close around Yosuke’s wrist he can almost feel the pulse beneath the skin, close enough suddenly to confuse for the thudding of his own heart. Nothing to say beyond that damned second button in his left, clenched tight as a promise, the smooth metal tattooing a clean unbroken circle into his palm as they run.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap for the main story! There's still the epilogue to go, but thank you for being lovely and sticking with me.
> 
> BOWS TO FLOOR


	11. what I know so clearly [epilogue]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand that’s (really, finally) a wrap. All my gratitude to everyone who’s followed this loooong slow burn because YOUR LIGHT KEEPS ME GOING. 
> 
> Special thanks in the form of loving high-pitched keening wails to Susie (whom you can find [here](http://evandrelical.tumblr.com/) and [here](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sashimisusie)) for being my WIP-dump and my headcanon sounding board and the aibou to beat all aibous. They’re also doing me the honor of picking this monster up and illustrating it, so stay tuned for more slow-burn-ness in visual form (!!!!!!!!).
> 
> A thousand times thank you from my heart again!

The river always sounds the same.

Souji knows this for a certainty. He can leave and return and leave and return a hundred times and still feel something deep in the heart of him being pulled magnetically toward the babbling, easy rush of water over the rocks, tracing its steady course to the sea. His ears are full of it when he and Yosuke turn off the road at a run and slide down the incline, collapsing breathless and boneless down into the grass.

“Man, I’m sweating something fierce. Did we have to run all the way?”

His ears are full of river and his eyes are full of sky, and he’s still got Yosuke’s hand. They’ve sprawled out on the bank this way before, two lazy boys with nothing better to do, but never like this, never touching, never holding on to one another. It’s a big change, Souji thinks, as he turns his head toward Yosuke, catches and holds his eye. It’s something he’d dearly love to be able to get used to, given the chance.

“Hey, partner.” Yosuke’s still huffing and puffing a little, but it seems that what he has to say can’t wait. “About what I said earlier—”

“Yeah, about that.” It probably wouldn’t do to tell Yosuke that he’s played the words back in his head at least fifty times, looping them over and over on their run from the school gate to here. Souji’s also made sure to tuck the button carefully into his pocket, pushing it all the way down so it doesn’t fall out. “I thought—”

Yosuke’s not entirely listening. As soon as Souji starts to talk it’s like his mouth also conveniently remembers how to do its thing, kicking into gear and accelerating to a speed of approximately six words a second. “I hope you don’t think it’s weird; I didn’t know how to say it exactly.” He rolls onto his side, for emphasis, seemingly unaware of the fact that the movement rapidly closes whatever space remains between them. “And really, Teddie wouldn’t shut up about the damn button, he’d been telling me to do it for weeks, and I—”

Souji blinks up at him, unsettled both by the sudden hail of words and the fact that he can feel Yosuke’s shallow, slightly ragged breathing right against his cheek. “I thought I was going to have to say it first.”

“I totally get it if you don’t—” A pause as Yosuke’s  brain finally catches up, and his own words evaporate as Souji’s begin, slowly, to sink in. Souji’s field of vision is suddenly all huge, bewildered Yosuke-eyes.

“You— _what?”_

“Rise wanted me to sweep you off your feet.” Souji feels himself smiling again—that huge ear-to-ear crescent of a smile that says Yosuke may as well have hung the sun in the sky. It’s unbridled and utterly unlike him and a little embarrassing, but Souji finds he might not even mind that so much, if it’s just for him. “She wanted me to run down the aisle shouting your name. Should I have listened to her, do you think?”

 “… Would you have done it?”

“Is that a yes?”

“No, man. I’ve seen you pull enough crazy stunts for one lifetime.” When Yosuke starts to laugh Souji feels the shaking in his own ribs, making him forget how to breathe all over again. He forgets how to think of pretty much anything when Yosuke looks down, straight down into his face. “But, wow. _Really?”_

Maybe the thing Souji can see in his eyes is a kind of awe, and maybe that’s also why his voice goes so quiet on the _“Really?”_ the water’s song almost drowns it out. Maybe it’s almost hope.

“Since forever,” Souji says, and it’s that little candlelight-flicker in Yosuke’s eyes that makes him reach up, slide a hand behind Yosuke’s neck and pull him down into a kiss—or what passes for a kiss, the closest you can get when there are stones digging into your back and blades of grass tickling the backs of your ears and you’re smiling too much to make your mouth do anything different. Yosuke inhales sharply, and those are definitely his fingers threading into Souji’s hair, pulling his head up at an angle that almost hurts—urgent in a way that makes Souji gasp and shudder into the touch, but still somehow gentle, wondering. Like he can’t believe this is really happening, like he doesn’t see how they could have wanted the same things all this time and not known.

The air between them is so warm when they part it almost seems alive, shifting and shimmering in the spring sun.

“Oh god,” Yosuke whispers, eyes wide. “I’ve got so many things to tell you.”

“We have time,” Souji says.                                 

They both know there’s no better way to put it—and then Yosuke’s grinning and saying “Finally” and pressing his forehead against Souji’s, and as he starts to laugh again Souji’s arms lift and wrap around him and then Souji’s laughing too, repeating “Finally, finally” like he’ll die from it, right up against Yosuke’s lips and breathing his breath.

 

* * *

 

 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, Ted.” There’s a suitcase handle in Yosuke’s right hand and a duffel bag big enough to stick a person into in his left, and it’s a near-superhuman feat to cradle the phone precariously between between his ear and his shoulder as he half-lifts, half-drags a significant portion of his life up the front steps of a building that’s probably taller than all the shops in Inaba’s shopping district stacked one on top of the other.

“I found the place already. I’m on my way up now,” he says, as he hauls himself into the elevator and punches the button for the fourteenth floor. “Are you settled in already? Don’t give Tatsumi-san a hard time, okay? And say hi to Kanji for me.”

“Yeah, I will.” The elevator opens with a metallic ding, and Yosuke shuffles out into a wide, airy hallway, stretching nearly out of sight in both directions, so quiet he can hear his voice bouncing off the walls. It’s unit 1408 he wants, so he hangs a right, walking all the way down to the end. “Hey, you’d better still show up for your shifts on time or Dad’s gonna come right down here and tan my hide.”

“Okay, I gotta go. Be good,” he’s saying as he draws up to the apartment to find the door already open, held in place by a pair of boxes stacked neatly in the doorway. There’s a pause. Teddie’s voice rings in his ear, tinny and exuberant. “Huh? Gross! Kidding, I love you too. Bye.”

“Who’s that you’re saying ‘I love you’ to?”

When Yosuke looks up from stuffing his phone into his pocket Souji’s standing in front of him, leaning one languid shoulder against the doorframe. It’s a wonder how he looks so at home, for all his old-looking jeans and untidy hair and the dusty grey smudge across the front of his shirt. Almost smug, like a king on his throne, never mind that he can’t have started his own part of the moving-in process much more than a few hours earlier.

“Dude, it’s just Teddie. He was calling to make sure I didn’t die.”

“You seem to be in one piece.” Souji’s eyes make that sweeping searchlight motion up and down, from the crown of Yosuke’s head to the toes of his shoes, a small appreciative gleam in them he’s never seen before. “Is that really all you brought?”

“Uh, no.” Yosuke passes the duffel’s straps into Souji’s outstretched hand and follows him through the doorway, parking the suitcase against the wall. “My dad’s sending a truck over with the rest tomorrow.”

A soft snort, almost a laugh, as Souji sets the bag he’s carrying down on the floor. “The prince of Junes, huh?”

“Shut up, I don’t wanna hear that from you.” Yosuke aims a swipe at the top of his head, and Souji dodges; his fist bounces off the wall instead. There’s something shiny hanging around Souji’s neck, a small metal disk on a string that fell out of his shirt when he ducked his head down—when Yosuke cranes his head to takes a closer look at it, close enough to ascertain what it is, he startles backward. His back hits the wall, dull thump of flesh on plaster.

“Oh my god! Souji, oh my god, tell me you didn’t. _”_ He can feel the blood in his body draining away again, faster than ever before, and his limbs seizing up. Maybe this is what rigor mortis feels like.

“Tell you I didn’t what?”

“The _button._ Have you been hanging on to it like that this whole time?”

Souji’s tilting his head, trying his best to school his face into an expression of innocent confusion. There’s that gleam in his eye again, though, and a crooked little quirk to his lips that Yosuke’s recently figured out is him fighting not to laugh. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I? It’s my most precious possession, Yosuke.”

“Can you not say things like that with a straight face? If you’re gonna be annoying you’d better just stay in Inaba.”

“But I’m already here,” Souji points out, as if it wasn’t already obvious. “So I guess you’re stuck with me.”

Stuck with him _._ When Yosuke looks around, _really_ looks, he knows there’s not much here yet. The space that opens out past the door of the apartment is still mostly bare—cream-colored walls, wide windows curtained with pale green, a smooth clean floor. A couch, a dining table. A kitchenette off to the side Souji will probably turn into a state-of-the-art, restaurant-quality cooking facility over the course of the next few months. A couple of Souji’s books on the kitchen counter, a half-assembled collapsible shelf.

It’s pretty embarrassing to imagine the two of them filling that space together, marking it out as their own with more books and cushions and posters and other odds and ends they’ve picked up and brought with them from other places they’ve lived in their lifetimes. It’s kind of scary how excited he is, how the thought sets his heart to racing.

“God, I don’t know if I wanna kill you or kiss you.”

He says it mostly to prove to himself that he can, and that all of this is real—this room and everything in it, and Souji leaning against the wall next to him close enough to reach out and touch whenever he wants to, smiling that rare smile, the one that just bursts across his face without warning, so unguarded he looks almost like a different person. Yosuke can hardly believe that smile is real, either, much less that it’s something just for him, a particular star coming out only when they’re alone together.

Souji laughs, soft and low, and there’s something about it that sounds just like the Samegawa, murmuring on its way over the stones, journeying always toward some invisible sea. It sounds like home.

“Yosuke,” he says, “could you go close the door?”


End file.
